


The Diary of Dysfunction.  (Fanfiction 100--Callie/Erica)

by punky_96



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-16 03:26:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 101
Words: 81,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14155620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punky_96/pseuds/punky_96
Summary: Re-post from LJ.Set post Erica leaving SGH.  The diary entries will be organized into 4 parts:  processing, contact, progress, and resolution.Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica, and all entries are linked back to the table or to the next in chronological order.There is an Extra #28 that I will just put at the end so it won't mess up the numbers of the chapters.I'm not sure it is still active, since I claimed my win a long time ago and never got a response.  However, when I checked there were posts to the community as of Dec. 24, 2017.  So people are still posting to The Ultimate FanFic Challenge.  LINK:  https://fanfic100.livejournal.com/profile





	1. Beginnings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Story told in alternating POV of Callie and Erica after Erica left SGH. The vast majority of entries are PG, but there are a handful that are R.
> 
> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica
> 
> 1-25 processing (A little heavy with all the processing) (Callie thinks the aliens have taken Erica, etc. All the Alice references started.)  
> 26-50 continued processing and eventually contact is made between them (A new hospital among other things)  
> 51-75 will be progress as they get to know each other once again  
> 76-100 they work it out and get together

Welcome to the:   **The Diary of Dysfunction**  
It will be organized into four parts, each 25 prompts.  
**Part 1:  Processing**  
Part 2:  Contact  
Part 3: Progress  
Part 4:  Resolution  
  
Odds=Callie's POV  
Evens=Erica's POV  
  
**Title:** Diary of Dysfunction  
**Fandom:** Grey’s Anatomy  
**Characters:** Callie, Erica, general cast, OC  
**Prompt:** 001, Beginnings  
**Word Count:** 1,509 words  
**Rating:** pg-13  
**Summary:** Callie & Erica’s journals.  Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica  
**Author’s Notes:** No spoilers.  Erica already left the show so this is AU.  
  
  
_**Fanfic 100—Beginnings**_  
  
**February 1, 2009**  
  
    I’m 33, but today I feel 13.  It’s been along time since I’ve kept a diary.  Back then I was in junior high.  I had a crush on Samuel Cortez.  I had never felt anything like the butterflies in my stomach that I felt then.  I always thought the girls were so stupid when they obsessed about their hair and clothes.  I rolled my eyes when they oohed and ahhed over some one new to the school.  I laughed at them when they cut pictures out of Tigerbeat and Throb magazines of Johnny Depp and River Phoenix.  
  
    Until I was put with Samuel in History Class…  
  
    I couldn’t get words out of my mouth. I felt like an idiot all the time.  When he smiled, I dropped my pencil.  We were doing a report about the cattle drives from Texas up to Kansas.  He would get so excited when he told me about stories he had read about the wild west towns.  He was so in love with the gunslingers and the vigilantes.  His face would light up and his eyes would sparkle.  
  
    I think he thought I liked all that stuff too.  I didn’t.  My eyes lit up because I was able to sit with him, able to look at him with unfiltered abandon.  I had no idea what it was to fall in love and I had no idea that you were supposed to guard yourself against it.  I had no idea that feeling like this could be wrong.  It was all sunshine and daisies.  
  
    There was a teacher at school who everyone talked to.  Most of my friends had asked her about something at one point or other, often dragging me with them.  So one day I went to see her after class.  I think I remember what she told me word for word…  
  
    “These emotions are incredibly intense.  They are intense no matter what, but you are feeling them for the first time.  And when you are feeling something new for the first time it is amazing and overwhelming.  When you feel something intense the first time it is even more so.  First crush, first love, and first heart ache—those are special things that will be with you forever, so they are vivid and dramatic.  It’s hard to remember that when you are going through them, but it’s all part of this whole growing up experience.”  
  
    Twenty years later, I can remember her words like she is sitting here talking to me on my bed.  I can’t help but re-think what she said and wonder what she would have said later if I had told anyone.  Or what she would say now as I sit here.  I feel so 13 right now that I wish she was here.  And it brings tears to my eyes after all this time.  Her presence was so calming and her words were so thoughtful.  She waited before she spoke as if she really listened and thought about what she said to you.  And she’d offer you the tissue box or a kick in the shins.  
  
    Samuel had been my first crush.  He was my first love.  We used to go to the park and watch soccer and sometimes we’d even play on a team if they were short.  Sometimes we just played one-on-one for fun.  When I fell on him he would hold me down on top of him and laugh a deep rumble from his belly.  It felt amazing.  He would walk me home whenever he had the chance and kiss my cheek at the door.  He was a gentleman and sort of shy most of the time.  Except when he talked about the gunslingers and the cowboys.  I was glad that he still talked about them.  I liked him better when he was expressive and the lights were shining in his eyes.  
  
    Heartbreak.  That word does not even begin to cover it.  Halfway through our freshman year Samuel convinced me to have sex with him.  My parents were out of town and he was so gentle, so shy, and I loved him so much…  We watched “Say Anything” and then we had awful first time sex.  Neither of us knew what to do, but we understood the basic premise.  We were both incredibly nervous and his shyness had come back with a vengeance.  We should have given up.  We shouldn’t have even started.  But with dogged determination we found a way to defile ourselves together and take down our year-long relationship.  
  
    He left after.  I took a shower and went downstairs and watched tv for hours.  I didn’t call him.  On Monday at school, he avoided me.  No one said anything about it for a week.  Then no one would talk to me.  Samuel was a rock star however.  The following week Esmerelda and Kasey called me a whore.  And the week after that, Patrick asked me out to the movies and the next day Mark asked me to a party that his older brother was throwing.  I said no to both of them.  
  
    They each had gotten uncomfortably close to me and Mark had even touched my face as he told me, “I thought you were a sure thing, baby.  Samuel told me all about how good you were.”  I ran to the bathroom and threw up for several long minutes, then I just stayed in there until the bell rang.  I was late to class and it was the final period, so I just walked off campus.  
  
    That teacher was right—first times were intense and overwhelming.  I didn’t get it then, but I understood later that while they stayed intense, the impact generally lessened over time.  There was never a crush that was quite as intense, nor a love that shined as brightly, and a break up never quite hurt so bad.  
  
    Until, Erica.  
  
    I guess though the advice is still the same.  It was new territory.  It was a first.  My first girl crush.  My first girl love.  My first girl sex.  My first girl break up.  My first girl broken heart.  
  
    Do all beginnings have to crash so hard?  Is that the only way we learn to guard ourselves?  I did not know that I could fall in love with a woman.  The thought had never occurred to me.  Why should it?  I had always found a way to have a good time with me, despite each new heart ache.  And the teacher was right—it hurt less over time.  
  
    I had no idea that I could fall in love with Erica.  Or she with me come to think of it.  And so I accepted her time and attentions.  I cherished the moments when we hung out and actually missed her when we weren’t.  
  
    And when Addie pointed out the kind of relationship she saw?  Well it was like history class all over again and Addie had assigned me to work with Erica.  Only this time instead of cattle rustlers and vigilantes, I got to hear about hearts and surgeries.  And this time I was as excited to talk about hearts and surgeries as she was.  
  
    *sigh*  Beginnings hurt so very much.  How is it possible that just three months ago I thought I had it all?  How is it that what felt so real, so stable and so certain was just a house of cards that crashed down around me one night outside the hospital?  
  
    How come I still show up for work there everyday?  It wasn’t enough that George fucked me over and I stayed.  It wasn’t enough that I almost was in a fist fight at lunch in front of everyone with Izzie Stevens.  It wasn’t enough that I got into it with a patient’s fiancé.  It wasn’t enough that I was the party girl with the man-whore.  Now I was gay for Erica Hahn and she left.  And I’m still here.  
  
    I’m still the girl in the back of the class that chews her hair.  
  
    Only now I skulk about in on-call rooms and flirt with hot interns like a crazed bunny.  I live my life in extremes, just like when I was in junior high and high school.  
  
    Well.  If I’ve learned one thing from all my failed beginnings—I guess it’s that there’s always another beginning to move on to as you move away from the last one that you’re moving on from.  
  
    I wonder if I could find a psychologist that gives as good of advice as that teacher from twenty years ago?  I wonder if that teacher is still there?  
  
    Well, Diary, I guess we’ll be spending a lot of time together.  It’s lonely living with Christina.  We don’t speak girl.  And with Erica gone, there’s no one besides Mark.  He’ll eventually get tired of my chatter.  And somehow I just want to keep some of this to myself.  I guess I want to cling to my hope despite everything.  I want to pretend that Erica and I are still beginning…  I cling to it desperately, actually.  
  
—Callie

 

 


	2. Middles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

 

 

_**Fanfic 100—Middles**_  
  
**February 3, 2009**  
  
Beginnings, middles and ends—my literature professors always talked about how stories had them.  My anthropology professor talked about civilizations ebbing and flowing in an endless cycle as one civilization began, prospered in the middle and then began the slow road to decline.  Psychology says that relationships follow a cycle of beginning with initial closeness, a middle zone of happiness interrupted by some kind of problem, and either circling back to closeness or spiraling out of control and ending.  
  
The beginnings of surgery are exciting.  The middle is the hard work that you have prepared endless years for.  The end of a surgery is hopefully the success at the end of saving or changing the person’s life forever.  Unfortunately the end of the surgery can also be the end of the person’s life.  The cycle does not re-new for that patient, but it continues for the surgeon who must endeavor to always learn from the past and not lose another patient to the same end.  
  
My time at Seattle Grace had a beginning, middle and an end.  The beginning held a world of promise—a fresh start on a clean heart so to speak.  I was able to impress my colleagues and challenge them.  I kept them on their toes and at a distance.  I was as cold as the scalpel that I wielded.  The middle was a search for success.  I had eclipsed Burke at SGH and I had his lap dog resident following me around to suck up any pearls of wisdom that I might drop.  I was on a quest for the Harper Avery and like the height of a civilization—I was successful.  
  
I didn’t get the Harper Avery.  I kind of got my best friend I guess, but that was taken away, along with my certainty that I was heterosexual.  Then my best friend was gone, when I needed her most and had found out the entire hospital was a house of cards built on the lies of Izzie Stevens.  The road at the end was very short and very steep.  My career is solid, but the rest of me is still struggling to understand how I went from the successful happy middle to the crushingly painful end.  
  
When Callie defended Izzie, my heart began to flat line.  When I challenged her, I was charging the paddles and using them on myself.  The brief back and forth we engaged in was like the fevered efforts of a surgical team to revive the patient.  Only there was no team.  There was no one that could have revived me.  Only Callie.  Callie could have saved me, but she just watched.  Callie had a big heart.  Callie cared about me.  Callie wanted to be with me now that she figured out that I had some little something that she wanted that Sloan just didn’t have to give.  Callie was helpful.  
  
Only, she stood there watching me slowly die in front of her as the monitors beeped and buzzed out of control and the sound of the blood rushing through my veins was deafening.  She didn’t care, didn’t help, didn’t reach out, didn’t save me.  
  
I realized in that instant, everything I thought I knew about Callie was a lie.  
  
Callie must not be those things.  I was mistaken when it mattered most—I had gotten it wrong.  Callie was a person I had never seen before in my life.  The truth fell from my lips like the confession of a dying man.  “I don’t know you.”  
  
I strode away with the certainty of my words ringing in my ears.  The silence was deafening just like it is in the OR when the time of death is called and the monitors are silenced and everyone pauses out of respect, or awe, or sadness, and the silence is thick in the room until it is no more and no one is left but the body.  
  
Dead man walking.  That was me.  Callie should have followed the code she had so desperately just defended, she should have reached out to me and helped bring me back from the brink.  I guess she figured I had already flat lined and there was no code to abide by any longer.  
  
It was the end.  There had been no beginning.  We were only told about the middle—but it was already the end.  
  
My time of death was November 3, 2008 at 8:59pm.  
  
And yet something else must have begun then.  Something dark and sinister, like they say the afterlife or its creatures can be.  My days never seem to end and I am in the middle of a vast blackness that had no beginning and seemingly has no end.  
  
I am done with Seattle Grace, Seattle, Washington, Callie, Christina, Izzie, Richard and all of the other number 12 gossip mongers.  
  
And yet I wear her like a skin.  Like a thin coating of medicine that seeps into my skin around the clock as I continue in the vast middle-ness of my life.  I need this darkness to end, so that I can find a way to begin happiness again.  
  
  
\--Erica

 

 


	3. Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Ends**_  
  
**February 8, 2009**  
  
    I changed schools junior year.  It just wasn’t worth the hassles anymore.  Samuel was the most popular boy in school and I still loved him from the back of the room, as I chewed my hair and tried to not make eye contact with anyone ever.  
  
    A new school is a place for a new beginning.  
  
    I cried everyday of my new beginning for five months.  The whole first semester with new kids, new classrooms, and a new start—I spent mourning the ending of my crushed and bruised happiness.    The happiness that I had been so juvenile as to think would last forever.  I mourned Samuel.  The sweet, shy, soccer loving boy who had gently fumbled with me through crush and love, and even sex—that boy was gone, dead forever in front of my eyes.  In his place was a cruel impostor with slick hair, a fake smile, hallow laugh and new girlfriends.  He didn’t play soccer anymore.  His eyes were dark all the time, because the innocent light in his eyes was gone.  
  
    I bet he had forgotten all about the wild west towns and cattle drives.  
  
    I tried to tell myself I didn’t care.  All through the rest of 9th grade and all through the whole of the 10th grade—I mourned him.  And even in my new found freedom, in my fresh start—I was stuck mourning the end of my first beginning.  
  
    In February, just after the second semester, Ricardo showed up in my French class.  We were both fluent in Spanish and figured we’d take something else.  He played the guitar and I sang.  He came to lunches on the weekends and we sat on the back patio facing the beach playing songs and singing.  He even tried to teach me to play the guitar, but I wanted to sing.  I didn’t want to focus on learning enough guitar to do both.  
  
    We ‘dated’ for a year.  We never so much as kissed though.  We never talked about it, but we just didn’t.  Ricardo talked about writing a book when he grew up and being famous one day.  He said I’d see his name in the news 10 years from now.  I told him that I had no doubts.  Ricardo asked me about what I wanted to do and I finally admitted that I wanted to be a doctor.  He was the first person to ask me and we were already seniors.   
  
    It’s rather “American Pie” of me, but we went to prom together and that was when Ricardo and I broke the bonds of our platonic friendship.  I have to admit 15 years later that I started it.  In my defense, I had to—he was so handsome in his tux and it was just so romantic.  We were dancing in the center of the floor.  I’m not sure how two shy unpopular kids ended up in the middle, but it felt so right with him.  No one else was there to tell the truth.  It was just his hands on my hips and my hands around his neck.  I felt like I had never seen him before.  
  
    Janet Jackson “That’s the way love goes”.  Through the whole song we were asking questions and answering them with the touch of our bodies.  We got closer and closer to each other, only to break apart again.  Each time we separated for less space and time and stayed closer longer and hotter than before.  At the end of the 5 ½ minutes, I crushed my lips to his and we stood in the middle of the dance floor during the whole pause between songs until “Two Princes” from the Spin Doctors came on.  
  
    He went to Emerson College in Boston in the Fall and I went to UCLA in Los Angeles.  We kept in touch for a fraction of time, but it was just a smooth transition into another part of our lives.  I was sad to see him out of my life, but I understood that it was the way of how our lives were going.  
  
    That ending, unlike Samuel’s, only served to let me move on with my life.  I was strengthened by having known him and I was buoyed by the fact that I had in fact overcome my first crush, love, sex, heart ache, and I had been brave enough to begin again.  I was able to see my own strength because I had undertaken to try it all again.  I knew that Ricardo and I would be going separate ways, but it just made sense—like the final chapter of the book of us.  
  
    Endings should be that—they should make sense and bring understanding and closure.  Endings imply that something is finished, complete, done—and not rough, ragged, painful, and eternally confusing.  
  
    Erica left and I understand why.  I understand that I wasn’t enough for her.  I understand that the hospital that was already nuts in her opinion had crossed the final threshold for her of comprehension.  I understand that it wasn’t working for us.  
  
    I take partial blame in driving Erica away.  
  
    I can’t feel like there was an ending though.  I can’t feel like anything was finished or that I reached a new understanding.  It was like we were mid sentence and aliens beamed her up.  So I’m still here, coming to work everyday, sitting at our lunch table and hovering around our bench in the front of the hospital.  Waiting.  Waiting for my ending to happen—even though I know it won’t be a happy ending—I still need it.  I want that sense of completion.  I want that final fatal wound, so that I can patch things together, pick up my shreds of self and move on.   
  
    I wait.  I wait for the aliens to beam her back down.  Maybe they’ve kept her long enough that she won’t be pissed anymore?  Maybe they’ll have scared the bejesus out of her and I will be the familiar face that she’ll turn to for comfort and I can prove to her that I’m here?  Maybe they’ll flashy thing her like in Men In Black and she’ll only remember the good stuff? Or maybe she won’t remember much at all except heart surgery and I can win her over fresh from the start and do it right?  
  
    It’s been three months.  
  
    Three months is only 12 weeks—it’s a blip in time.  It’s a really bad leg break that didn’t heal and some physical therapy after the cast is off.  That’s hardly any time at all.  She can come back.  She will have had time to see that we are both in this.  She will be able to see that she shouldn’t have left like that.  She will have had time to see that I couldn’t cross over to `I’m so gay’ so quickly.  
  
    I don’t want this first crush, first love, first sex, first heart ache to be the beginning of a new list of endings.  I don’t want to hear the advice from my teacher echoing in my head as I try to recover from this.  Samuel did this to me when I was 13 and I stumbled through life until I was able to put myself back together again.  I had much less at stake and a lot more resiliency then, even if I didn’t know it at the time.  
  
    Now?  I really could have been holding my forever happiness in my arms and I let her walk away.  I pushed her sometimes, but at the end I just let her go.  I have so much more at stake now and I am not as resilient.  I think that the force field of the heart can only take so much and when its strength is worn down, then the hits—hit harder.  
  
    Samuel, Ricardo, a couple of others, George, even Mark—that’s a lot of hits for my heart to process.  Each with their own legacy in my mind.  All raising issues of care and concern, love and friendship—but all marking me in the end.  
  
    Erica.  Erica may have been the final hit that I cannot recover from.  
  
    Because my heart believes she is a beginning that is still waiting to really happen.  
  
    Because my heart rejects that she belongs in the pile with all those other endings.  
  
    Please aliens—give her back.  Or, take me away too.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	4. Insides

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Insides**_  
  
**February 10, 2009**  
  
The insides of the human body are my domain.  The OR and the scalpel are my court and my scepter.  I crack into people’s chests everyday in order to find the infection that betrays the body and cut it out.  I mend fences, clear out blockages, and send people on their way.  When ever possible I leave the body better than I found it.  I am not to be trifled with in the OR and my expertise is sought out by patients and colleagues alike.  I plan ahead, do my research and go in with a clear head.  I do not often find surprises and deal with what is given to me by the body itself.  Even I cannot argue with the pure fact of what the vessels and tissues tell me.  
  
Yet, the inside of the human heart betrays me.  It undercuts my knowledge at every turn and shows me as a sham.  My mind knows one thing and then I find my body reacting contrary to its orders only to find that those orders had been rescinded by the renegade heart in my chest.  A rebellious part of my own body that would revolt against the clean order of my OR and my pristine and ordered life.  
  
I made a clean cut when I walked away from Callie.  
  
I am beginning to wonder about my sanity or my genetic origins.  Perhaps my heart was from another person all together and I was part of some kind of science fiction experiement, created much like Edward Scissorhands, only I was given extraordinary hands and no heart.  Only to have the most delicate feeling emotional heart on the planet shoved into my cold exacting heartless self.  I understand the pull to be human, to make the construct less robotic and more human, but am I really that disconnected from life, from soul?  So much that I view myself as a science fiction story?  What madness is this?   
  
I do not even know this woman who haunts my dreams and invades my thoughts.  This woman who I wear over my dead body like a skin.  I do not know her and she does not know me, and at this point separated by inches and lines and colors on the map—we will never know each other again.  I should be happy, should be able to move on, and to use this heart to pump life back into the rest of me.  The heart got what it wanted and now it needs to suck it up and move on—do its job for crying out loud.  Maybe I got the heart of an intern when I wasn’t looking and I’m in the body of an Attending?  Step it up.  Pump.  Breathe.  The damage can be repaired.  It can always be repaired—until it simply can’t.  And now is not the time.  I am not beyond repair, and I am not dead.  
  
Callie.  Torres.  Cal.  Calliope.  Iphegenia.  Calliope Iphgenia Torres.  
  
Perhaps that’s all I know of her?  And all I will ever know of her.  It should be all that I want to know of her. Except that my heart knows her.  My heart knows the woman that I fell in love with.  My heart did not read the memo from my brain that calmly stated this woman betrayed your friendship, undermined your relationship before it could begin, and this woman did not know you enough to reach out and care when the life was sucked out of you.  No, indeed the heart threw those memos away and has put on music so as not to hear the brain shouting at it.  
  
***  
  
I was making a salad and when I cut into the avocado I cried.  I stood in the kitchen with half of the avocado in one hand and the other half on the cutting board with the seed lodged there.  The avocado was yucky green, with brown and black spots.  It was not okay to eat.  Its day had passed without my knowledge.  I had missed the opportunity to enjoy this avocado.  I put the knife down and held the counter edge.  It looked like a good avocado.  I had picked it especially with a couple of others for my salads for the week.  It had such promise.  
  
The insides of the avocado did not match the outsides.  The tough exterior looked solid and healthy, at first touch it revealed no damage.  On the inside, however, it was slowly approaching its own avocado destruction.  It was beyond repair, beyond usefulness by the time anyone looked closely enough at it to tell it was not all right.  I cried not for the avocado, but for myself.  I was surely tough, solid and healthy on the outside presenting as a world renown heart surgeon to the world, but on the inside was I rotting?  Would I be beyond repair, beyond usefulness by the time anyone looked closely at me?  
  
Knowing how my insides ached after such a brief scorching time with Callie, how can I rely on anyone else to help my insides?  How can I let someone notice me and count on them to help me?  
  
But if I don’t, what will happen to me?  
  
I’m a heart surgeon.  Why can’t I fix this on my own?  
  
I left November 3, 2008 and it is now February 10, 2009.  Surely I must be mending by now?  Surely I am not an avocado silently going bad waiting on someone’s counter.  My work, new house, new town, new colleagues—surely they all point towards progress?   Surely?  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	5. Outsides

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Outsides**_  
  
 **February 11, 2009**  
  
    My outsides match my insides finally.  Unfortunately, that means I look like the hot mess I’ve been feeling for months now.  Only now everyone can see it.  At least there’s a lot less questioning involved and people steer clear of me.  It’s funny that my insides match my outsides now.  
  
    My insides were gay for Erica, before I even knew that was an option that my body would consider, or my mind or whatever.  My insides had trouble telling my outsides what they were supposed to do.  And my mind was completely AWOL at the wrong time.  I knew that having sex with Erica was the best thing I had ever tried and that I would never be the same, but I chose to look at the situation with my outside eyes—I saw an awkward moment, I told myself that it wasn’t natural, and I told myself that I couldn’t do this.  When in fact, I had done it and wanted to learn how to do it better.  
  
    My outsides panicked though.  I was 33 straight.  I had long hair.  I had been married.  I had boyfriends.  I loved penis.  And then my outsides put up walls against Erica and my outsides stomped all over my insides by calling Mark to that on-call room and into my bed.  Twice.  
  
    On the outside, I was Callie Torres, Consummate Heterosexual.  It said so on my SGH Name Badge.  Didn’t it?  
  
    On the outside, I was confident, cocky, confrontational, quick, comedic…  
  
    I wasn’t gay on the outside.  I wouldn’t be gay on the inside.  
  
    And yet.  She’s been gone for three months.  And I am gay-er than ever for her.  
  
    My insides crave her touch, her smell, her presence.  I am so freaking gay that I’m making up words like gay-er to describe my gay feelings for her.  My insides crave her so much, that I flirt with every blonde that comes within my radius, even when I know that I’m not interested.  Even when my insides and my outsides are in clear agreement—THAT ISN’T ERICA.  
  
    When I was with Samuel, my insides and outsides matched too.  I was so mushy in love with him on the inside and I acted like it—my outsides matched.  I looked the perfect picture of happiness.  My mother tuttered over us when he came over.  My father looked at him like a son.  My friends were happy for me.  It felt good to have outsides that matched my insides.  
  
    And then that fateful night.  That fateful week.  That god forsaken year.  
  
    My insides burrowed down in safe as far as they could go and went to sleep hoping that it would all blow over.  On the outsides?  I became the weird tough kid that ate my hair in the back, but wouldn’t let anyone get to me.  I focused on my studies and excelled when others failed.  My outsides told them that I was not beaten.  My outsides protected me from the pain that my insides were drowning in—if only I bothered to look inside at myself.  But I didn’t.  I went forward as best I could with my outsides buffalo-ing my way through the world.  
  
    Ricardo took over a year to help me resuscitate my inner self.  By then I was fluent in French and strong enough to sing with him.  His smile pierced through my armor and pulled out part of my soul.  I think that he knew that my outsides were not at peace with my insides and I think that mystified him.  He was so gentle with me.  I think that’s why I wanted to take him into my bed.  Taking him in, wouldn’t that revive my insides?  Wouldn’t he be able to spark the untouched corners of my soul that I had left hidden even from him?  
  
    But he left.  And I floated.  I floated through college, medical school, and most of residence.  I bumped against George in my floating and I thought I recognized an outsider like me.  He was the heart in the elevator guy and on the outside he kind of shined.  Well, for a time, anyway.   That isn’t to say that I didn’t date or learn how to play bedroom games.  No, I most certainly did.  I had to toughen up my outsides and dating and playing hard games, well that kept my edges sharp and ready.  I kept my defenses up, hoping for the day that I could lower them—for the day that my tricks would be appreciated as talents and I wouldn’t have to keep up my defenses ever again.  
  
    George was…  a complete disappointment on most levels.  And really we were both so damaged that I think that we were blind—because we wouldn’t have hurt each other the ways that we did, if we weren’t blind.  
  
    Erica was my friend.  I wasn’t trying to prove myself to her. I wasn’t trying to force her to love me, like I ended up doing with George.  I wasn’t trying to compete with her.  She wanted to gets drinks, play pool, hang out.  She didn’t like people and was okay that I didn’t like people.  She was funny.  She treated Christina like crap which was awful, but at the same time she was the only one that Christina cow-towed to.  I think that in time that pick on the resident business would have morphed into something else.  Erica was willing to go to sunrise yoga with  me, could out drink me, play darts, and just be there.  
  
    I wanted to be in her presence.  I wanted to sit close on the couch.  I wanted to put my hand on her arm when we talked, or my arm over her shoulders when we walked.  I wanted someone to eat lunch with and she was at a table all alone.  I wanted to drink to forget the day and she had a glass already poured.  I wanted to rest from all the people and she offered me refuge in the storm.  
  
    My insides soaked it all up, but they never said a word.  They never told my outsides that Erica was more dangerous than Samuel, Ricardo, George and all the others put together.  My outsides carried on totally clueless, until my muscles remembered her touch and my brain had memorized her landscape.  My outsides were oblivious to the possibilities.  
  
    Until Addison came.  Addison saw with clear eyes.  She was not blinded by my past or my outside/inside split persona.  Addison had the clear eyes of someone who was on the outside looking in.  
  
    That’s when all hell broke loose.  My insides stood up and did the hula.  Erica and I in a happy relationship?  My voice nearly broke, but my outsides were in control of it still—I love penis.  And I did, right?  Only Addison saw a happy couple.  Could I deny that?  Weren’t we inseparable?  Didn’t I touch her an awful lot?  
  
    I went into the bathroom that day and tried to hurl my insides out into the white porcelain of the locker room toilet.  My insides made me feel ill, so if I could just throw them up, then I could get back on with my life, right?  I didn’t feel better when I was done.  I was searching for answers.  My insides were tapping out messages in a forgotten language on the back of my brain and I didn’t want to decipher them.  
  
    Who else looks like Erica and I?  Christina and Meredith.  
  
    I went and talked to them.  
  
    Of course they weren’t a couple.  I knew that.  Neither were Erica and I.  
  
    They "screwed boys like whores on tequila".  
  
    Then they "either tried to marry them or drown themselves".  
  
    Hmmm.  I see.  Well, Erica and I had certainly not been screwing boys like whores on tequila.  We were too busy.  And we weren’t trying to marry anyone either, or drown ourselves for that matter.  Thank you, very much.  
  
    “I see a happy couple.”  
  
    Addison please.  But my outsides were cracking around the terrible truth that my insides were now beginning to tell.  We were a happy couple.  We weren’t dating anyone else—we were exclusive.  We ate almost all lunches and dinners together.  We often grabbed morning coffee together.  We stayed at each other’s houses, well, I stayed at hers.  But that was because of the cold war between her and Christina and because I didn’t have a guest bed to offer her…  We went dancing together, played darts together…  
  
    Damn it she was right.  And even after Erica left, I continued my inner battle.  And she’s still right.  Addison was right and she’s not here to help me.  
  
    Erica left me holding the bag and I don’t know what to do with it.  I get it that she left for good reasons.  I get that.  But I am angry because I needed her—I just didn’t know it.  And I’m angry that she didn’t need me.  If she needed me—she would’ve called by now, right?  
  
    Unless…  the aliens…  right…  Well, as crazy as it sounds, why not though?  
  
    All the rest of this shit is totally crazy?  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	6. Hours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Hours**_  
  
 **February 13, 2009**  
  
“broken spells”  
  
I put the cowrie shell to my ear  
for reassurance  
the childhood spell  
resounded through me  
once again  
  
I could believe that inside  
was another world  
safe, locked away,  
as yet unknown,  
un-born,  
maybe unimagined,  
un-created,  
not feeling alone  
at least not conscious of it  
  
not me, I was far enough  
along the time arrow  
I was not safe, as yet un-born,  
un-created,  
not unfeeling—alone  
in a world of 2 dimensions  
I could not (would not?)  
conceive of a third dimension  
  
I listened with all my heart  
to the cowrie shell  
but the spell was broken  
once the cowrie shell left my ear  
I was not safe  
conspicuously exposed  
I was crushingly conscious of my loneliness  
  
***  
  
As a kid you can’t wait to get older—you count the hours of each day approaching your birthday and salivate the morning that you are another year older.  And yet each year you realize that you don’t feel older on your birthday, you question the counting of those hours.  Until, you forget all about them and the years just pass by in a blur.  You mark big ones—the years you graduated high school, college, and medical school; the years you checked off personal milestones like leaving the country, losing your virginity, learning a song on the guitar; and maybe the obligatory birthdays like 18, 21, and 30.  But the hours are not counted anymore.  
  
Hours spent in line.  Hours waiting for a phone call.  Hours in surgery and watching a patient in recovery.  But you don’t count them so much as check them off as so many chores to complete.  Residents wait on the hours while I move on to the next surgery.  Day time hours blend into night time hours and so on the days pass by.  
  
Today, I found myself in a loose hour and my mind wandered.  I have not written a poem since high school, but I found myself thinking of Callie and hours long gone, but not forgotten.  I longed for a simpler time before any of this was even an idea in my mind.  When I was young, my dad had a cowrie shell and he would only occasionally let me hold it.  For some reason, I formed quite the attachment to it.  I guess it symbolized freedom and the ocean and my dad, in a way that a photograph or other knick-knack never could.  It was an extension of the safety I felt around him. To hear the ocean rush in my ear and be able to shield myself from the world around me and any troubles I had.  
  
The only problem was that when I removed the shell from my ear the illusion was broken—my safety once again in jeopardy and my heart left open and exposed.  I have not thought of that in a very long time, perhaps since I first moved out to go to college, but sitting today with my thoughts once again turning to Callie, I yearned for that symbol of safety, that bubble or spell that I could wish to weave around myself—even if it is only for an all too brief time.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	7. Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Days**_  
  
 **February 14, 2009**  
  
    Life is just a series of days—day after day with no end in sight.  I show up to work.  I try to stay focused.  I work as many hours as I can.  I stay in on-call rooms so I don’t have to go home.  Today is no exception.  Only today would have been my first Valentine’s Day with Erica.  It would have been the first Valentine’s Day that I looked forward to since Ricardo senior year.  It’s just a day, right?  A holiday based on our need to manufacture an occasion to give gifts and declare our affections.  
  
    What would I have done if she were still here?  What level of relationship would we have been at?  Why am I torturing myself with these stupid questions?  
  
    We would have been dating for a little over 3 ½ months.  We were already on the ‘staying over’ stage before Erica left.  I don’t think we would have given each other a dozen roses.  I don’t think we would have decorated each other’s lockers.  Mark would probably have made some dirty comments to us.  Erica would have shot him down again.  He really was one of her favorite punching bags.  Although she wouldn’t have admitted it, she was rather fond of her targets in her own way.   
  
    Christina would have told me I was gross or something when she caught me drooling over Erica at the nurses’ station.  She would have reminded me that just because it was Valentine’s Day, that didn’t change the rules.  No Hahn in the house.  I would have given her a hard time, probably said something naughty by now about tying a sock on the door or something.  Inwardly I would have been thrilled because I would have preferred to stay at Erica’s far away from Christina that night.  
  
    I wonder if we would have been out at work by now?  It’s only been three months.  The pain of her leaving caused me to come out little by little as I continued to talk to Mark and ended up talking to Christina.  Eventually between my misery, some flirting, and the gossip queens I was outed.  I don’t know what would have happened if Erica was here.  I wasn’t exactly treating our relationship as the serious thing that I should have been.  
  
    If I knew then what I know now…  yadda, yadda, yadda…  
  
    What has Erica gone through in these three months?  Did she go back into her hard Hahn shell to protect herself?  Like a turtle?  Did she continue to be `so, so, so gay’?  Has she flirted?  Has she moved on?  Is she at a new hospital or something else?  Is she out there?  Maybe the aliens did take her?  
  
    103 days ago she left.  I count the days like I used to count the days left of school.  Only back then I was counting down to something that I wanted—time off of school to be away from people.  This counting?  I’m just counting days and days and days.  I’m not counting down to anything great, instead I’m counting how long my misery has been going on.  
  
    On the first day I talked to Mark and Christina.  In the first week I broke down in the OR in a tragic fireworks display of emotions that could no longer be denied.  By the first month I had tried to flirt with Sadie.  Mark could read the desperation and the mixture of my emotions.  He wanted me to be on the road to recovery, but he knew I wasn’t.  He actually said `No Hot Interns.’  I found out later that was as much for his benefit as it was for mine.  At least I didn’t have to suffer the way he did on that issue.  
  
    By the month and a half mark the Chief had sought me out because of the upcoming board exams and his concerns over watching me.  He was concerned that I didn’t seem as rested or focused as I used to be.  He said he was available if I wanted to talk.  He said I was beginning to seem like…  well, he danced around the subject, but he basically said I looked the same as when all that was going down with George.  He didn’t know it was just that it had been 43 days since Erica left.  I was just 43 days into my lifetime sentence of no Erica.  
  
    By the 72 day mark I was talking to Arizona.  I needed a fix and she was okay with that.  She was only here temporarily.  She understood that I was broken, but covering.  Unfortunately Karev and a nurse stumbled into the on-call room and the resulting gossip made sure that the whole hospital staff knew I was playing for the other team.  Arizona was tough though and she helped me try to deal with the issues of coming out at work.  She had to do the same thing at her hospital originally.  
  
    In fact she saw the daring side of me and so we played it up.  If they wanted something to talk about—then we would give it to them.  It was kind of juvenile I’m sure, but it was a heck of a lot of fun.  I also think that I made a friend for life, if we do keep in touch.  She told me about her girlfriends and their awkward moments.  It was good to laugh; it was good to talk about Erica in a fun way.  So often when I talked about her or thought about her—it was sad.  There was a sad song in my head about her.  But with Arizona and the spark of the dare I was able to remember the good parts of our relationship and friendship.  For the first time happy songs played in my head.  
  
    By the time Arizona left on day 86 I was fantasizing about moments that Erica and I could have shared, if only we had gotten the chance.  
  
    I think there would have been a lot of teasing over our days.  Even in the dark and twisty place I became comfortable with myself and being gay quickly.  I think by Christmas I would have been dragging Erica forward in the relationship process.  I think that I would have been able to get Mark to help me rig mistletoe all over the hospital.  I think that I would have had a lot of fun trying to get her to kiss me in the hallways.  She would have turned all sorts of red the first time that Mark caught us kissing.  She wouldn’t have spoken to me for a week I’m sure when the chief caught us.  
  
    And having the Christina and Meredith group clap for us near the nurse’s station would have been a nuclear frost.  How many victims would have been claimed in the wake of Hurricane Hahn?  
  
    But making up to her would have been a fun challenge.  As much as she fought it I know that I had a hold on her.  She would give me that sideways look and try to stay stern, but the blush that creeped up her neck would have told otherwise.  She would have tried to use the Hahn laser beam glare on me as she crossed her arms over her chest and huffed her disapproval…  But I would have known by the gleam behind the glare that she wasn’t really upset with me.  I would have known with some flirting, teasing, and touching that I could persuade her back to my side.  
  
    And I know now that all of those troubles would have been worthwhile.  All of those days would have been worth the drama, because the fun, because having Erica would have been worth any number of days of stress and confusion.  
  
    Because these days of loneliness and figuring things out with other people or alone?  These days I would trade in a heartbeat for the lifetime of days that I should be having with Erica.  The days that I will get to have when the aliens think I have grown enough that they indeed bring Erica back to me.  
  
\--Callie

 

 

 


	8. Weeks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Weeks**_  
  
 **February 16, 2009**  
  
     The best part of the week is Monday.  Days like today are special because they start full of possibility and focus.  On Monday I begin the week that I’ve planned and know that the schedule is on track, surgeries will happen, and I will be able to look back at the end of the week knowing I accomplished what I set forth to do.  Mr. Sweeney’s valve replacement is this afternoon.  Mrs. Bishop’s angioplasty with shunt is Tuesday.  Patty Dorton’s ablation procedure is on Wednesday morning early so we can schedule another if we need to.  Thursday brings an afternoon in the OR supervising a 6th year perform a valve replacement on Trisha Briggs.  If that resident does well with me today on Mr. Sweeney.  Friday will be spent bringing in follow-up patients that need checking in on.  
  
     One of the changes that I made to my schedule here is that I schedule Fridays for routine checks and charting.  I find that I like to schedule surgeries as close to back to back as it is responsible to do.  I like to control my schedule and a surgery is a predetermined block of time that is spoken for in a hospital.  I know the others regard this as a peculiar quirk of Dr. Hahn, but they would never say anything or question me.  I like it that way.  I do not hog the ORs Monday to Thursday, but I do push as close as I can to it.  I like the feeling I have at the end of the day.  I like to feel that I have pushed hard and used every minute possible for my patients.  But on Fridays it is good to settle into small routines and procedures, and take care of housekeeping with patients and paperwork.  Then I can start my weekend.  
  
     I feel more ordered now.  It has taken almost four months, but I am beginning to feel different.  I don’t know if I’m feeling more like myself, because I’ve never felt this way before, but I feel more certain about what I am doing.  I have always wanted to be the best heart surgeon I can possibly be—that has not changed.  But I feel like I am listening to who I am instead of hiding from myself.  I go out if I feel like it.  I dress nice if I’ve the mind to.  I make foods that I like and feel less like I’m an actor in my own life.   
  
     Who knew that I like to watch the same DVD over and over during the week as a kind of mental junk food?  I guess it’s like the movie of the week when I was growing up.  And I always liked sourdough bread for sandwiches and still do, but now after hanging out with Callie so much I eat some of those crazy breads with the wheat and the sunflower seeds and even something called a honeyberry.  It’s funny the things that stick.  She was always trying to get me to eat her kind of bread, and I always stuck to sourdough.  Now, on my own, I eat the honeyberry bread even though I’m not quite sure what a honeyberry is or where it would be grown.  
  
     I find myself noticing people more than I ever have before.  I guess my eyes were opened by Callie not only to women, but to people in general.  I still don’t like people and avoid small talk, but I’ve given myself over to observing people.  I even have a weird rapport with some.  As long as it doesn’t involve small talk or making friends.  That I still am not going to do.  
  
     Helena Sambrano was one of my first patient’s after taking the job here.  Her grandson Brent comes to see her frequently even if she’s only in for a routine check up with me.  He told me all about Finding Nemo the second time I met him.  The third time I saw him Helena had been admitted because she had another heart attack.  He was down and out, but he was willing to go hand in hand with me to get his grandfather some coffee from the machine on the third floor.  I reminded him about Finding Nemo and offered him my lucky fin.  From that time on whenever I see him with Helena or her husband Neto we greet each other by saying ‘lucky fin’ and touching our elbows together.  
  
     I do not linger over long with them.  I do not make extraneous small talk.  But I observe them together and I greet them warmly.  I walk hand in hand with Brent and let him do all the talking.  And I move on.  I guess I have learned to listen.  I still don’t talk or reach out much, but I have learned to let people share themselves with me.  I have learned it does not have to be all hearts and heart surgeries all the time—and it doesn’t have to be intense friendships that under cover of the night become something more without telling you that’s what they are doing—like a mushroom.  
  
     In these weeks I have learned that there is a middle ground where I am safe.  I can interact with others, learn from them and slowly open myself, but it does not have to be in a way that I am left suddenly not knowing who my one source of friendship, comfort, love even is at the end of the day when I need them.  
  
     I do not know how many weeks I will spend in observation.  For I guess that is what I am doing.  But three and half almost four months later I find that is where I am.  Maybe in the first weeks I was simply shut down and on auto-pilot.  I did not notice the barista named Amy that smiled at me until about three weeks ago.  I finally realized that Matt the butcher knew me by name at the grocery store.  It is funny that in my career I plan my weeks out and know what the final outcome is supposed to be.  I am able to assess, re-assess and re-formulate a plan so that those goals are accomplished.  In my personal life the weeks tick by without my having any concept whatsoever of the goal in front of me, or what stage I’m in, or even being aware of them.  
  
     How many weeks should I spend in observation?  Will I just know and move forward from here?  I must have been in shut down mode for 12 weeks if I just started noticing the names and faces of people I see all the time in stores.  How did I know to move into observation mode?  What mode should be next?  I’ve always had one or two kind of friends at work, but I don’t want another Callie situation.  At Seattle Presbyterian I had Marina and Brandon.  Now that I think about it, Marina could have been like Callie for me had we spent just a little more time together.  She was always pulling me out of my shell and dragging me to do things with her.  So at some point I need friends at the hospital, but not deep friends.  And then outside the hospital?  What do I need?  Do I need anything?  Maybe not right now.  Maybe in some weeks I will know.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	9. Months

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Months**_  
  
 **February 17, 2009**  
  
    Each month has it’s own flavor.  And the winter months this year have been bitter.  Not only was it a particularly rainy and cold winter, but it was a lonely winter.  I’m not really sure what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Miami.  Would I have met Erica?  Would I have still had a string of relationships that didn’t work?  Would Ricardo and I have been able to hang on tighter to each other in those early years?  Maybe if I stayed on the East Coast it would have been more likely.  But Los Angeles to Boston to Miami and balancing family, school, and friends was just too much.  Even our friendship eventually faded across the miles.  
  
    I can only hope that the Spring months bring a refreshing taste to cleanse my palate.  The Spring is a time of renewal and awakening.  I still feel the drag of January on me as the February fog follows me around in the darkness.  I hope to shake off the gloom in the Spring.  It is always better.  I can look forward.  Maybe I can stop counting off the days to mark my loneliness, and instead just live them one by one to savor happy quiet moments.  
  
    Three months.  Three months from the kiss to the kiss off.  Three months from the kiss off until now.  Each month a new flavor:  straight, confused, bi, alone, contemplative, playful, and healing.  What will the next six months bring me?  What have her six months brought her?  Any closure?  Any healing?  I haven’t really.  I am going to survive.  I am going to be okay.  I don’t know that I will live the full life that I thought I was starting with Erica.  My heart had truly swollen with happiness in our secret bubble of the budding relationship.  In the safety of Erica’s arms I had been able to conquer the world.  But when the sun came up, well, it was like those nightmares people have where they show up to school naked and everyone stares and laughs at them.  
  
    The power of Erica’s touch on my body and in my heart was such that I thought everyone could see.  The idea that they all knew and I was new—it was too much.  Too overwhelming to feel like they were all looking at me seeing what I myself had trouble seeing.    
  
    I learned that you could be lonely whether you were literally alone or you were surrounded by a group of people.  In high school I was constantly surrounded by people that made me feel alone on purpose.  I was surrounded by my family all the time as they tried to give me support.  It didn’t matter because I went through my days in a bubble of loneliness.  I carried it with me everywhere I went and the days became months and then a year until I met Ricardo.  I was less lonely then, but going away to California and the sunshine—I took the loneliness with me like a favorite blanket.  
  
    Each month settles on me like another layer of blankets.  I wonder how many I will suffer through as I go through my days superficially happy, but my heart slowly being encased.  I feel like my heart is a shell at the bottom of the ocean.  Slowly sediment is settling over it until it is pressed so forcefully that my heart becomes a fossil.  Not gone, no my heart is not gone, but it will be preserved forever as it is.  It feels as though it will never change.  
  
    Arizona told me that she had felt that way when her first girlfriend had left.  She said that for a long time the months would never end, until one day she looked at the calendar and she was quite far from where she had been.  She tried not to look again for a long time and eventually she fell in like again.  The months passed quicker even though she still missed the girl.  In time she said the sediment was shaken off and the heart rose to the surface on it’s own.  She said it was as if her senses were turned low and then overnight she woke up to see the sun, to feel the chill in the air, and to see people’s face in focus again.  
  
    I asked her how long and she shrugged.  It’s different for everyone she said.  But each day gets you closer to the re-awakening.  I asked her if I could just hibernate like a bear.  She laughed at me and said that I was doing better than I had been when she met me.  I brought Erica up less often and looked less sad when I did.  I smiled more often and laughed harder.  Arizona was so tender when she was talking to me that I felt sad that I couldn’t really like her.  But she knew.  She knew that I thought of Erica and that I was handicapped in a sense.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	10. Years

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Years**_  
  
 **February 23, 2009**  
  
Years.  We’re all supposed to get years.  Years to live.  Years to love. Years to work. Years to retire.  Years and years and years.   
  
My years as a child were too short and my years as an adult have been lacking in joy.  I wish I was still that kid standing on the swing as it went back and forth.  So many possibilities ahead of me, so many thrills and choices—oh to go back and know to treasure every moment.  I could once again jump off the swing when it was at its highest and land triumphantly in front of my classmates who said I couldn’t do it, that I was too afraid, or that I would get hurt.  I would have drawn a picture or written it down so that it would have been remembered forever.  
  
One day I want to pass along those moments to a child of my own.  I want to give them years of childhood and I would do everything in my power to not let those years be cut short in any way.  
  
As the years go by I wonder if that will be a dream left out for someone else to fulfill instead of me.  I have become filled with a silent acceptance.  Maybe that is not my dream to make reality.  I haven’t kissed enough frogs to find my prince(ess) and so I do not have many years to have with that person, and even less to spend with a child.  I would not want to be a parent only to be taken away from them in death.  A case could be made for getting knocked up out of high school I guess.  Maybe I should have been like my cousin?  And yet she is not happy either.  For too many years her dreams have been on hold.  
  
Too many people let happiness float by them not recognizing it for what it is, and letting go of it too quickly.  It is to often that happiness is only realized too late, too far, after too much time has passed.  I think Callie and I could have been happy.  I think that we were not careful with each other’s fragile hearts.  I think that we should have had years to get to know each other and years to love each other.  I think that years may not have been enough, but they would have been priceless beyond measure even so.  
  
I don’t know what her hold on me was/is after all this time.  Why her?  Why me?  Why was friendship somehow not enough, and yet relationship was like base jumping in to the Grand Canyon without a shute?  The friendship was not solid enough to withstand the earthquake of our love.  My mind still shudders from the memory of her kiss, of her between my legs, and I can still imagine the taste of her on my lips, the feel of her hair in my fingers.  I can divide the moments we had together in my mind and spread them out and re-invent them and give us years.  Give us a happy ending.  Or give us a future at least.  I re-write our moments together in my mind and change the clothes or the hospital and bring in friends from this new hospital.  
  
The years I create for us are so vivid in my mind, and yet, they slip through my fingers like liquid jello.  My hands shake when I look at them after a particularly vivid dreamscape parades through my mind.  Days like today cause me to re-think every moment of my existence, to examine every choice in the road, to go back and evaluate how I got here and if it is worth the high road that I took if I have sacrificed my heart in the process.  
  
Today I came out of a doomed surgery to deliver bad news.  A little girl had been struggling with heart issues related to a condition called Marfan Syndrome.  She would have been fourteen this summer and in the fall she would have been starting high school.  She had collapsed at school and her family and close friends were in the lobby waiting on every tick of the clock for news.  They knew and had known for some time that she was fighting a struggle that would eventually claim her and yet they sat holding onto hope because it was all they had left.  
  
Her body could not withstand the procedure and she slipped away before they could say goodbye to her.  I tossed the paddles to the floor in a fit of anger.  Serena, one of the scrub nurses, grabbed hold of my hands and stared me down like I was bull in a china shop.  When my breathing settled down she drug me by my hands into the scrub room.  We scrubbed out in silence and then she handed me a towel.  When she asked what happened in there—I told her.  She held me in a hard hug that was not friendly, but somehow was comforting.   I soaked her shoulder with my tears and she looked me in the eye when it was all done and said I would get through it.  I believed her.  
  
The girl’s mom looked like Callie.  The girl could have been Callie’s daughter.  It ripped me apart that a girl would die so young, but it was all the worse to think I may not get the chance to share that love of a family with anyone—least of all Callie.  The parents would not get more years with their daughter, but they were blessed to have had these years with her.  Her friends would not get to share their secrets with her any longer or have fights over stolen lunch chips, but they did have this time with her.  Years that no one could take away from them.  Years that would stay locked safe within their hearts and memories.  
  
I cried for their loss, and I cried for my own missed chances.  Callie and I really didn’t have that much together, but her hold on me after all this time has to mean something.  It could not all have been in my head.  
  
Sigh.  That doesn’t mean there is anything I can do about it.  What I can do, is offer support to that family and those friends of hers.  I’m a cold hearted surgeon who had to let her go, but I can get to know her through their memories and I can answer their questions if that helps them.  
  
Tomorrow is another day.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	11. Red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Red**_  
 ****  
February 23, 2009  
  
My parents want me to come home for my cousin’s wedding in June.  It’s a Saturday so they know that I can make the time, especially this far in advance.  I don’t want to go.  I’m happy for her and it sounds like he’s a nice guy, but I’m just not close with her and it’s not my idea of fun right now.  I know that I will find love and all of that, but I’m still a little hurt that I may have found love and just missed it.  Didn’t recognize it for what it was, while it was in front of my face.  
  
Would Erica have gone with me?  I couldn’t drag my ‘No, Mom, She's not my girlfriend girlfriend’ to a wedding across the country could I?  That would have been bad.  Not as bad as leaving her that morning or sleeping with Sloan that day, but it still wouldn’t have been good.  
  
For all that Arizona said I talk about her less, I think it’s because I just don’t say it out loud.  Instead I write it here and endlessly think about her when other people are talking.  When my mom brought up the wedding I just spaced out mumbling yeah’s and uh-huh’s to her while I thought about Erica with me at a fancy wedding.  Not my cousin’s wedding, but just some wedding in my head.  And then girl that I am I pictured her in a wedding dress and then a white tux and white tie.  She’d be gorgeous in a wedding dress.  I would want to take her into the coat closet and mess up her dress and her hair.  I’d want to find that something blue and get distracted looking for it instead.  
  
Erica in a white tux and white tie would be fantastic too.  I think she’d wear red high heels, with red cuff links, a red tie bar, and she’d have a red ribbon in her hair.  I think I’d have a red dress with white over it.  Maybe I’d cut my hair to show off my neck.  I think Erica would eat me up with her eyes as I walked down the aisle in white heels as tall as hers, a red dress covered in white to show how I clean up well, but I’m naughty as all get out.  I think that the kiss the bride would border on totally inappropriate when her hands crushed into my shorter hair.  Addison and Mark would cheer and Christina would pretend to gag and do another shot of tequila with Meredith from her flask.  
  
But Erica in a dress…  Maybe I’d be in a dress too.  Hmm.  No I think I’d be in a tux, but maybe I’d be in the black tux and she’d be in a burgundy dress with black trim.  I’d be on my knees in the limo and her dress would be up almost blocking her view of me.  
  
I think I want two weddings.  And if I sit here and fantasize about it anymore, then I might want 5 or 6 weddings.  And maybe 20 or thirty honeymoons.  
  
Why did I fuck it up again?  
  
Oh, yeah.  I wasn’t sure.  
  
I wasn’t sure that I would be pining away for my best friend and lover.  Because she was a girl.  Please.  This is 2009.  It was 2008.  Like people can’t be gay or lesbian or whatever?  I mean it wasn’t like Erica was running for president and I was afraid of being out to the national press and criticized for not being first lady quality or something.  It was the fucking hospital where I’ve been for 6 years and everyone knows me.  And who cares what they think?  I took on the lot of them for George and it didn’t matter.  George found out I lived in the basement of the hospital and started staying over with me instead of going to that nice cozy inbred house with Meredith.  And when Richard found out all he said was that I couldn’t continue to live there.  Neither one condemned me or thought I was weird.  George may not have loved me as much as his precious friends, but he didn’t not love me because of a weird fact about myself.  And Chief?  He had drinks with me and sat and talked with me for a long time (once I put my shorts on).  
  
So if they found out I liked girls.  Well, one girl.  I really only liked the one girl.  
  
Would they really have acted differently?  If anything I’d have been more popular with Sloan and Karev.  And Christina and Meredith are even more not-girlfriends than Erica and I—they have longevity and whatever boys around them at the time trained to let them have girl-time.  Seriously if I was Shepherd I’d ask Sloan to replace my man card.  Oh.  That.  Never mind.  They’re probably a couple too.  Is Addison the only one who’s not kinda gay?  Oh, wait she’s on the vagina squad.  
  
Okay stop.  Not everyone is gay, but I sure panicked for nothing.  
  
What was my other problem?  Oh, I didn’t know what to do and it felt weird at first.  
  
Samuel and I had awful first time sex and it ruined us, along with whatever crazy fucked up peer pressure he was going through to be a MAN.  What the hell did that mean, anyway?  But no.  I mean the sex was just awkward and bad.  He didn’t know if he was and I wasn’t sure how to…  Okay.  Just it was bad.  Ricardo was better.  By then more people had gone there and talked about it.  We had talked about it.  And we were just much more I synch with each other so that the awkward and downright bad wasn’t so much.  Besides with all the development and emotions we had going into it, we would have had a hard time messing it up.  
  
Later I found practice made perfect.  
  
With Erica.  A wall went up.  I think I wanted it to be harder or more weird than it was.  Although it was awkward the physical act brought us both release and it was mostly mental that I was worried that I hadn’t done it right, or didn’t like it enough.  
  
I mean I was enjoying it.  And while I shouldn’t have been with Sloan again, he re-assured me about what I was trying to do.  So I felt more confident about it.  I know from hindsight that I would have developed that confidence in time by talking and being with Erica.  Arizona was very clear about that.  She didn’t speak to me for two days after I told her about that part of everything.  She couldn’t imagine if her girlfriend had done that to her.  Then again from what I know of Arizona, she would have been planting those seeds for discussion and learning together from the beginning.  Arizona is just like that.  I wish that Arizona and I had become friends before I met Erica so that I already had a gay friend to talk to, and one like Arizona who would have pushed me toward Erica and slapped me for even considering any other options.  A lesbian yoda or something.  Age regardless, because clearly my 18 year-old behaviors were not reflective of my 33 years and Erica’s throw down in the parking lot and abrupt departure did not reflect the professionalism and maturity of her 41 years.  
  
So my two problems:  that people would find out and freak, and that it didn’t feel quite right at the first.  Both INCREDIBLY STUPID.  
  
Maybe I was a little scared that Erica jumped off the lesbian cliff that morning and I was just dipping my toes in the water.  Maybe I was afraid that she had left me behind.  
  
Like I was afraid to marry George in Vegas?  Cause I’m such a chicken.  
  
Six months of looking at yourself under the microscope doesn’t exactly make for a happy six months.  Arizona is right.  I talk about Erica less, and I’m less sad when I do.  What she didn’t add but I’m sure she noticed was that I carry with me an intense anger at myself.  It’s no wonder that I talk about Erica less—when I do I can’t help but imagine how beautiful our relationship could have been, and how angry I am at myself for screwing it up.  
  
\--Callie

 

 

 

 


	12. Orange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Orange**_  
  
 **February 24, 2009**  
  
I have realized that life is made of simple things.  Simple things that we take for granted.  Today I had to talk to my patient’s friends about her condition and the surgery.  She was 13 just two months short of 14.  Her name.  Her name was Chelsea and she knew she was fighting a downhill battle from a very early age.  However she was full of joy and wanted so much for her life and for those around her.  I did not get a chance to know her.  She was brought in for emergency surgery and that was the extent of my interaction with her.  
  
Her friends and family have let me know her.  I did the unthinkable in the career of Erica Hahn—I opened myself to them to be available, to answer questions, to let them tell me their stories if it could in some way help them. I had no idea what it would open up in me knowing the life, talents and stories of this young woman.  She was that indeed, she may have been a teenager, but she was a young woman.  
  
Her friends told me that she always said that people who complain are weak.  They said that through it all Chelsea never complained.  She called them when she would go to the hospital and she always left them with a smile or a joke.  They had made themselves a ‘family of friends’ after her surgery earlier this year.  One of them was the mom, another the auntie, there was a bossy older sister and true to their name they gathered like family around her real family and her.  They all admired her and let their tears fall freely over the beginnings of their loss.  
  
Life is surely full of simple things.  Her parents talked about family trips and how much she loved her younger sisters.  After I had explained to them and shared tears with them, they sang one of her favorite songs.  It was a song in Greek and through her tears her mother translated it to me.  
  
Life is made of simple things that we take for granted until they are gone.  Sometimes they are gone through the sadness of death and we can only remember and honor them in our hearts.  Sometimes they are gone through pigheadedness or lack of communication or blind rage.  Death, especially so young is truly tragic, but loss during life because of something stupid and immature is a different kind of tragic.  Chelsea did not want her family and friends to be sad.  She wanted them to live their lives courageously and to enjoy every moment they could.  
  
They were sad none-the-less, no one should have to experience the loss of a daughter, sister, friend.  Certainly not someone who was so young and so beautiful.  However they were all clear that she had understood, that she did not want them to be weak, and that she did not want them to live in a limited way like she had.  
  
She would want them to smile in her honor and to follow opportunities in their lives.  She would want them to cherish the small things in life and to not let go of life’s small pleasure.  Her favorite poem said that you should not be sad because she is everywhere.  She is in the smile of her little sisters, a sunbeam, a sparkle on the water and the sparkle of a shooting star.  Her friends remember her stealing their chips at lunch time and practicing old Greek folk songs at her house.  
  
When you experience a loss, even at the fringe as I am you feel the absence of that person.  I can not imagine what her parents and sisters are going through.  Chelsea had heart surgery six weeks ago and she has had health problems since her birth.  Her friends knew her limitless spirit and in this loss they are forced to accept the limitations of her body.  It makes you evaluate your life and choices.  If life can be taken away then every moment counts and every friendship is that much more important.  
  
And so…  I am back to Callie.  I miss her smile.  I miss big important things like her kissing me outside the hospital and practically exploding with nerves on our first date.  I miss her saying that she wants to be with me.  
  
I miss her pouring a glass of orange juice in my kitchen in the morning wearing nothing but her t-shirt because that’s all she had with her.  I mourn the loss of that moment, because now, nearly four months later I am not sure why that moment is lost to me.  I cannot remember what the problem was as I spend time with this family and small group of friends mourning the loss of this very young woman.  I do not understand what was so important that I could throw a chance at happiness away—maybe it would have been an imperfect happiness, but it has been thrown away without a chance to see it grow.    
  
Orange.  
  
Orange juice and Callie.  
  
I don’t even like orange juice, but I loved that Callie wanted to do something nice for me.  I loved that she wanted to share a nearly perfect morning with me.  In that moment of simple things that I did not understand—I loved orange juice as surely as I loved Callie.  
  
If those simple moments are truly lost to me, then I must keep them locked safe in my heart and honor her. If they are gone and I am changed forever, then I need to focus on the simple things in my life now so that I can cherish and recognize them for what they are.  I am honored to have operated on this young woman who I will never know.  I am honored to have met her friends and family and to have been accepted by them.  Their sharing has helped me far more than I can possibly imagine my presence has helped them.  Maybe that is how it was supposed to be, I don’t know.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	13. Yellow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Yellow**_  
 **  
February 27, 2009**  
  
When I was little my favorite color was red.  I had a spitfire personality and enough attitude for three kids.  My grandmother was constantly muttering about the santos and crossing herself in my presence and my mother used all of my names so fast and so often that I thought it was all my first name.  I thought that until first grade when I understood that I had a first, middle and last name.  My mom just didn’t now how to breath and my grandmother didn’t know how to stop praying.  So for the first part of my life my favorite color was red and my name all in one like ‘Cher’ was:   **** _Calliopeiphegeniatorres_.  
  
I’m glad that it turned out to be three names because that would have been a bitch to learn how to spell in the first week of first grade.  Talk about setting someone up for failure!  
  
When I met Samuel I had quieted down a lot and even changed my favorite color.  My grandmother’s praying must have paid off because I liked blue and the tranquility that it represented.  I used to sit out at the water’s edge when I wasn’t with Samuel and I would just watch the water.  Samuel’s favorite color was red and I thought we were like Yin & Yang of each other.  Boy/Girl, Red/Blue, Quiet/Social.    
  
After Samuel my favorite color turned to black along with my mood, social life, make-up and clothes.  
  
I hung on to a penchant for black even until now.  I guess it has become instinctual.    
  
With the black though I was able to have a color side by side with it.  I didn’t have to give it up for another.  I could have a dark edge and like any color.  No one bothers you, if you have a dark edge.  
  
I could have liked pink and Yang, Grey, and Stevens would have been too scared out of their minds to say anything to me.  
  
With Ricardo I think that I liked red again.  Not the bright primary red of my youth, but fiery red that reflected the passions that we shared for languages, music, and even sex.  Our friendship was mostly chaste, but there was a depth of emotion and thought present in everything we did together.  Ricardo re-ignited my fire for life and living.  It is a fire that I have never extinguished despite my heart breaks over George and Erica.  
  
If it is possible to have a third color then I would have to add yellow.  It would appear that my red has been lightened and lightened and lightened until there is a streak of yellow running down the middle of it.  Mark, Erica, Arizona and even Sadie were all blond with blue eyes.  I have a thing for blondes apparently.  I wonder if I ever do move on like Arizona said was possible—will it be with another blonde?  Will I always have a soft spot for them in my heart?  
  
Their being blonde is only one part of it.  
  
When Erica and I were friends we would go drinking at Joes.  Sometimes with Mark, but most often it would just be the two of us.  When Erica beat me to the bar, we drank wine.  However when I was first to belly up, then it was shots of tequila.  Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco…  That’s how the Spanish lessons began.  I used to keep her drinking until she couldn’t get to ten in Spanish.  
  
And when she couldn’t get to ten anymore, then I would quiz her on the words I had taught her.  Even inebriated she strived for perfection.  She wanted to finish the task I had set for her and she would get frustrated when she couldn’t remember.  
  
There were lots of words I liked to hear Erica say in Spanish.  And many more words that I would have loved for her to learn.  But I did not help us to have enough time for that.  I never got to hear her demand besos in Spanish or call me her novia.  
  
Amarillo—yellow.  I did hear that and it was like liquid gold to my ears.  A simple word, the color yellow in Spanish.  Or even a city in Texas.  Her husky voice would slide over it like tequila down your throat.  It would warm my body from my ears down to my panties even then.  Her tongue caressed every syllable and short-circuited my brain.  I had no other way to react so I giggled every time she said it.  Maybe my giggle effected her like her voice effected me?  I don’t know and I may never know, but I do know that she would say it over and over to keep me going.  I know what her hot breath on my ear feels like when she says it close to me.  I know how her eyes twinkle as she leans forward a hand on my thigh to say it again and again.  
  
Erica is yellow.  She is the gold of the sun.  She was honest and just, and fought for things.  I wonder if she had been in history class with Samuel and I would they have gotten along?  Would she have stood up for me?  Samuel liked red like a warning of danger.  Maybe he was like the outlaws that he liked so much from the wild-west towns?  If she had been there, my amarillio, my yellow one, maybe she would have been the gold of the sheriff’s badge?  I like to think that with her leather duster coat, Winchester rifle, and spurs that jingled when she stepped—she would have been the sheriff to run the outlaw who stole my heart out of town.  
  
Instead I was the red outlaw who stole her heart and ran her out of town.  
  
Sigh.  If only.  Maybe I should talk to the santos.  Or the aliens that have Erica.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	14. Green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Green**_  
  
 **February 28, 2009**  
  
I opened the closet today and faced down the last four of my boxes from Seattle.  I had forgotten that I had put them in there to forget.  If I had just been able to forget for a while longer I would be glad.  Plain cardboard banker’s boxes sat side by side in their anonymity.  I tried to shut the door and pretend that I thought they were just holders of other boxes.  Empty vessels of cardboard holding no more than a hidden quantity of equally uninspiring cardboard.  
  
But I couldn’t.  I knew they were not simply containers.  
  
I made it through cleaning the bathroom and taking out the garbage, but then I returned to them like a moth circling a flame.  I hoped that when I put my hand there it would not be burned as bad.  Those boxed held harmless items that simply fit, but they also held items that seared me from the inside to hold in my heart even for a second.  
  
I pull out all four boxes to the living room and push the coffee table out of the way.  I need the space to organize.  I want the space to I feel that I can escape, even though it is all attached to things ultimately in my mind anyway.  
  
I sit on the floor and pull the first box closer to me.  I flip the lid off and release a breath I had not known I was holding.  The baby box.  My green dinosaur with the white belly and terribly disfigured neck sits among other small mementos.  When I got that dinosaur I held it so tightly by the neck that I squeezed all the stuffing out of its neck.  In 35 years I have never been able to sufficiently squish the stuffing back into the neck.  I used to try occasionally even through high school.  My attempts were in vain though.  I am a heart surgeon, not a re-builder of vertebrae.  The neck filled with stuffing would stay for a few moments before drooping once again.  I broke its stuffed little neck, but I loved it.  So many things I have gotten rid of over the years, but the green dinosaur has outlasted them all.  
  
Callie loved him too and was furious I had never given him a name in all the years I had him.  She was outraged that I hadn’t even seen fit to call him something lame like ‘Dino’ at least.  It had never occurred to me.  I loved it and that was all there was to it.  Callie offered her surgical skills to Dino as she called him that day.  She would re-build his vertebrae in no time she said.  I declined and put him on top of the bookshelf where I hoped she would forget about him.  
  
There is a wooden circle with a plaster mold of my hand at age 5 and in my writing below it is the beginning of my doctor’s handwriting.  Erica is written in unsteady lines and loops.  The whole circle sits in my hand with my fingertips reaching out beyond the edge.  1972.  Sometimes I feel like I have come so far and other times I feel like I have gone nowhere at all.  
  
I spoke to Chelsea’s social worker in the Pediatric ICU today.  Neva was a calm and caring person.  She exuded those two feelings and I briefly wondered if people aren’t born to certain professions.  She radiated the two most important things that would be needed in a PICU.  I was detached, cold, and precise—all the things one needed inside an OR.  Neva had been working with Chelsea’s family and friends during her surgery two months ago and even before that when she had come in over the years.  I could not do her job.  In the OR and the ER there are tragedies of all kinds and dwelling on them could cause a person to become unglued.  However the OR and the ER have a sense of urgency and a constant shifting in personnel and patients.  The emotions of the ER and the OR are sudden and intense, but often they are not ongoing.  In emergency surgeries we do not even know who the person is that we are operating on as we wheel them into the OR.  In regular cases we meet the patient, consult, pre-op, check on, cut, and check on again before sending them home.  
  
In the PICU the social workers meet the patient often forming a bond with them over time.  They watch a patient recover and get well, sometimes only to return again weeks or months later.  They take care of the patients between their meals and meds.  They see them afraid and broken down or brave and valiant as they stay strong for their friends and family.  Social workers go from patient room to patient room checking on them and meeting the families day in a day out.  Families who spend any length of time in the PICU are given a more permanent button with their name written in permanent marker.  In the PICU the patients are under 18 many of them under 15 and it is a different part of the hospital all together.  From the main hospital you walk down the hall and have to stop to disinfect your hands and sign in for a particular patient.  Then you wear a name badge to identify you.  You go through the double doors and then another set of double doors twenty feet away.  
  
Once inside you have to walk through to the nurses’ station where the social workers gather and nurses and doctors come and go.  Each door is one of those glass sliders and there are screens blocking your view of the people within.  As you walk by you catch glimpses of children hooked up to various medical machines to monitor and help them.  I felt as though I had never been to a hospital before when I ventured out of the surgical floor and went in search of Neva.  Patients need both kinds of care from the surgical to the social and everything in between.  
  
I had not expected it to be such a surreal experience, but I found myself talking to this almost total stranger about how wonderful this teenager was.  I felt the tears and Neva had already reached to offer me a tissue.  She rested her hand on my upper arm comforting at the same time causing a fresh set of tears to make their way down my face.  She said that she would let me know as soon as the family had made arrangements so that I could go and pay my respects.  
  
I sit here on my bed writing with my broken dinosaur and weep for a girl who sang, stole chips at lunch, and had a family of friends who would have loved her enough to mend her if they could have.  By the time I met her she was like my green dinosaur and the damage had been done already.  No amount of love would have mended her.  But she did not complain, she met each day she had with a fierce desire to laugh, share, and make memories with loved ones until she simply couldn’t anymore.  I think that despite being broken and being gone from this world she lives on in the hearts of all that she touched.  It must be so for she lives on in my heart and I barely knew her.  I know that her friends will gather together keeping a place for her and honoring her as they move forward in their lives and go to high school next year.  They will choose things that would make her proud of her, things that she would have liked or hated, things that fill their hearts and lives with success and still leave a place of honor for her inside them.  
  
I put the green dinosaur on top of the shelf where it belongs.  
  
Half of me wonders if I should call Callie and ask her if she would still fix him for me.  
  
Half of me wonders if there is enough love between us to fix us or if the damage has well and truly been done.  
  
I put the lid back on the box and labeled it ‘baby stuff’ so that I would know and only would venture there when I knew what I was looking for.  The others I stacked in the corner of the living room as a reminder that they were still left to go through.  
  
The green dinosaur was an anomaly in my life.  It survived moves and purges and the carelessness of youth, which made it an anomaly by definition, but there was also the color.  My favorite color has always been blue.  I did not like green it was the favorite color of my very strict aunt growing up and I had always had an instinctual aversion to it.  Despite that natural aversion the green dinosaur remained my favorite amongst a whole universe of toys and treasures.  Chelsea was an anomaly:  a teenager facing death with the courage and joy of an old soul.  Even with Marfan Syndrome she was an anomaly tragically dying at 13 when the life expectancy now is 72.  
  
Anomalies make a mark.  Their uniqueness separates them from the crowd.  Callie was an anomaly in my life.   A breath of fresh air and a laugh in my face, she was a touch to my heart that had hardened.  I just don’t know if there is enough love to heal me, to make me strong enough to recover from her and face her.  Part of me wants to put a lid on all of this to stuff it down and focus on my job—the cold hard surgeries that quickly replace one another in a never ending tide of movement forward with only regard to helping as many as possible without regard to who they are and who will love them or miss them.  Part of me feels like I have been opened up like banana peel and that I am too vulnerable now from too many sides.  I managed to be drawn into this girl’s case, family, and friends and no my life is in a state of floating analysis as I contemplate philosophies of life, mourn her loss and that of her friends, and then begin to analyze my own life in light of these various revelations.  Part of me wants to wrap the peel around myself and take over the ER so that I will never have to stop long enough to form this kind of contact.  Another part of me wants to shed the peel all together and join the PICU team and focus on pediatric cardiology and research.  
  
I end another day thinking that once again—tomorrow is another day.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 

 


	15. Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Blue**_  
  
 **March 4, 2009**  
  
Mark caught me staring at the surgical board again.  I don’t know why, but I still look for her name.  It’s been four months almost exactly and I look for her name.  Why don’t I sit on the bench out front of the hospital, or ride the elevator up and down, or sit by the dart board at Joe’s?  Those places don’t hold my attention as much as the surgical board.  I don’t know why that is.  We never kissed at the surgical board, although maybe by now we would have.  We never really hung out there talking about the board like Christina and Meredith do.  
  
I guess it just represents her power and strength to me.  I remember hearing about how she re-arranged the board that time from Mark because she didn’t want Yang.  I thought he was so cute all flusterated like that because of the new girl in town.  I teased him relentlessly about how Mark Sloan met a woman who could make him shake in his boots and his pants tight all at once and wouldn’t give him the time of day.  He took the teasing in stride, but made me listen to his descriptions of her holding the marker and biting her lip as she erased and moved not only interns, but surgeries.  He at least paid me for my listening services in beer.  
  
If I had only known then the power that Erica had to get under my own skin, I might have been a little easier on him.  Nah, what woman effected him that way?  None, and so I know that I would have teased him.  But knowing what I know now, maybe I could have challenged him to a duel or something.  I am the closest female to Sloan in the hospital.  It would have been fitting to out kill the lady killer by seducing the highest object of his affections and forever sealing that he would never partake of that forbidden fruit.  
  
Oh, if only I could re-write reality.  Maybe the aliens can?  I should find out what I need to do to contact them.  It shouldn’t be that hard, right?  If they are studying humans and kidnapping them, then they have to be around here often enough to find one.  Maybe I could choke the living shit out of it until it gives me Erica back?  
  
So these are my days shuffling around the hospital, staring at the surgical board, and re-writing my history with Erica into fantastical stories about love or at least alien abductions.  He said that if I continue to be so blue, he’s going to write my name in a different color marker and call Arizona.  She’s the only blip of change that he’s seen in the last four months.  I wonder what color he would write my name in?  And whether Arizona would come back?  Mark standing in front of the surgical board marker in one hand and eraser in the other just doesn’t do it for me.  Erica should be the one here calling the shots and bending the hospital to her rules.  Weber should be gone along with Izzie and if Bailey had a part in the cover up, then she should be disciplined as well.  It’s just hard to work here and wish for her to come back, when the longer that I work here, the more I see the reasons that she had to leave.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	16. Purple

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Purple**_  
  
 **March 6, 2009**  
  
Life turns on a dime.  
  
Cheesy, but true.  Simple things make up a life, hours and weeks add up to years, and years are what we have to make the most of or waste away with things that don’t really make us happy.  My life has turned on a dime more than once this year.  Callie kissed me outside the hospital and my whole life boomeranged around that moment until I was blessed with perfect clarity.  
  
I was gay.  I could finally see after years of not knowing what I was missing.  
  
Callie wasn’t in the same place I was.  
  
It was so damn clear.  And my life once again turned on a dime when she babbled on about Stevens and the Code and completely didn’t see me.  It was so, so, so clear that she didn’t even see who I was.  That she didn’t hear the words coming out of her own mouth, not at that moment and not when she was telling me about sleeping with Mark.  
  
My way ahead was clear—full steam ahead and I was outta there.  
  
This time my life has turned on a dime and yet I am still in the same place.  Maybe there’s more than one kind of dime.  
  
It took seconds to wheel Chelsea into the OR.  It took hours to try to save her life.  It took minutes to call her time of death, tell the family, and watch them crumble.  Seconds took me into the moment with them and while they were literally moments in time—they were stretched out and heavy with meaning and significance.  Time was suspended in their grief and their knowledge that her suffering was at an end.  Seconds did not tick by in this instance and they were able to absorb each other and truly feel blessed that they had known this beautiful girl.  
  
Ever since that moment watching them, my life has turned on a dime.  Although nothing outwardly has changed.  I still work in the same hospital doing the same kinds of heart things.  I live in the same house.  And yet I am different once again.  
  
I see Neva now.  In the parking lot.  At the coffee stand.  In the lunch café.  She’s been to the surgical floor a time or two to search me out.  Once was to tell me about Chelsea’s services.  And another was to ask me to come by and check on one of her other cases.  
  
I see Neva.  I see that she has black hair with streaky highlights bleached into it.  I see that she wears her hair down almost all the time.  I see that she doesn’t wear scrubs because her job at the hospital is different than mine. I see that she is greeted warmly by co-workers and families in the café.  I see that she looks around when she is in public areas of the hospital and that her green eyes sparkle when they land on me.  
  
I realized that we are becoming friends.  Like Callie I didn’t realize it at first as we sought each other out with a purpose, and later when we accidentally ran into each other in public areas of the hospital.  Unlike Callie there is no accidental touching, no over familiarity.  I didn’t realize that at first until I realized we were becoming friends.  Just three weeks ago I declared myself in observation mode and now I’ve seemed to stumble into friendship mode.  
  
Do I say something to her?  I don’t want to be weird, but I don’t want to assume we are friends if we are not, and I don’t want to end up in some relationship purgatory like I was with Callie because we couldn’t figure out what we were once we realized we were indeed something.  
  
Today Neva was wearing a purple blouse that looked very good on her.  It hugged her body and made me realize that she was a beautiful woman.  Her hair and the purple blouse really made her eyes stand out.  Awkward as I am the compliments I give others are few and far between.  As usual I gave her my compliment feeling odd about doing so and felt that I hadn’t really said what I wanted to say, but refused to edit it.  I didn’t want to compliment her in a flirtatious way like I was checking her out, only I had realized that I was.  And I felt like time had once again stood still.  
  
She looked up at me her green eyes sparkling the way I’ve only seen them do for me and she blushed the most magnificent shade of red.  We stood there for a moment regarding each other.  
  
So do I say something else to her now?  That I want to be friends officially or do I just take these dimes that life keeps sending me and turn on the spot for them every time.  
  
What am I supposed to say anyway?  I’m bad at small talk.  I don’t make friends easily.  
  
Aarrgggh!  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	17. Brown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Brown**_  
 ****  
March 16, 2009  
  
What a long day today was.  I hadn’t even been at work ten minutes and I felt exhausted.  How I made it through the day is beyond me.  I’m so glad that there is a new Orthopedic Attending and they have me showing them around.  It means that while I have surgeries, they are actually taking the lead on them.  I was able to say that I didn’t feel all that hot today and just focus on zoning out.  That way I didn’t knick an artery and incapacitate someone who simply needed a new ACL or worse.  
  
Esmeralda Rubio.  From New Mexico, wanted a change of pace, recently divorced, not bubbly, but not anti-social either.  She seems to have the rocker chick thing going on even though she’s somewhat subdued about it.  It’s good I think.  We need a new rocker chick around here, since my rocker-ness is on vacation.  Who knows maybe she’ll help kick my rocker-ness back into gear.  I wouldn’t mind I’ve been all 31-flavors of mess so far and I’m ready to go back to being hard-core rocker Callie like I was before Erica, before George, before I had to move out of the basement.  I kind of liked her and don’t really know where she went.  I think Erica would have liked her too.  I was more to the point then, more fearless.  I walked in my skin a little better.  
  
Karev and the Grey group seem to like her.  After finding out that she liked the movie Hook and always seemed to find the Lost Boys wherever she went, he started calling her Rufio.  And whenever he thinks he can get away with it he says it like they do in the movie—Ru-fi-Ooooo.  It’s kind of entertaining and would totally make Erica want to smack him.  And that?  That’s super entertaining. I thought it was funny when she’d get annoyed with Yang.  This?  This would have been so much better.  
  
Karev is not the only one who is smitten.  Mark wants to show her his new leaf.  
  
I think his crush on Erica and my using him for sex before choosing the woman of his desire had a powerful effect on him.  That new leaf business wasn’t just because of the nurses.  He really had some kind of reflection going on.  That business with Lexie was cute, but ill-fated.  I felt bad for him when she told him she just couldn’t handle the idea of really taming the manwhore.  I think if she’s not careful she’s going to tromp on quite a few hearts.  I wish her luck, she’s going to need it.  One of her opening conquests in the realm of sexual politics at SGH was the manwhore—where do you go from there?  Who knows, maybe she’ll break the vicious circle and date outside the hospital?  
  
What a refreshing thought?  What a brilliant idea that we should all try?  Seriously.  We’re all dating someone here at work, or have dated someone or more than someone here, or we are in a not-relationship with someone here are work.  Let’s see…  
  
George/Izzie/Karev  
Meredith/Christina  
Lexie/Mark  
Meredith/Derek  
Mark/Derek  
Lexie/Meredith  
Christina/Owen  
Me/George/Mark  
Chief/Meredith (not like that)  
Bailey—she seems to rise above, but she gets dragged into all the business  
  
Code Black is an explosive in the building.  
  
At the public pool growing up the lifeguard told me Code Brown was a poop in the pool.  
  
People say that the shit hits the fan.  
  
Brown seems to be the color before Black in severity.  
  
So I think that at the hospital, SGH in particular, that Code Brown should be relationship explosive.  Or exploding relationship.    
  
Code Brown:  Exploding Relationship  
Code Black:  Explosive  
  
If it was an official code, then we could page everyone, rally the troops, activate an emergency plan of action, take evasive measures, alert the press…  Whatever.  I mean I know it’s private business, but it’s not like there are secrets in these swing-your-partner-round-and-round-halls.

  Even Addison knew that Derek was back with Meredith while they were together—nothing is sacred.  That’s truly the problem here I guess.  
  
Heart transplant patients aren’t sacred.  The love felt for them isn’t sacred.  Protecting our own isn’t sacred.  Standing up for friendship-now-relationship isn’t sacred.  It’s like a grey fog of moral confusion has descended on SGH.  There have been so many situations in the last few years that have called into question every principle of the medical profession and every moral that a person could have.  
  
I wonder what Erica is like at her new hospital.  Is she the new popular kid like Esmerelda?  Ru-fi-Ooooo.  Esmeralda has that I’m popular but I’m aloof thing going on.  She’s the center of attention without trying to be, which makes her that much more attractive to everyone.  However she doesn’t lash out if you reach out to her.  She doesn’t cut down the residents or interns, but she puts them to their places.  She likes the Ru-fi-Ooooo teasing, but doesn’t go out for drinks later.  I think she has an internal line that she won’t cross.  In that way she is like Erica.  There was a point at which Erica reached her limit of lines being crossed and she bailed.  I can’t blame her.  But watching Arizona during her visit and now Esmeralda as a new attending, I can’t help but wonder how Erica is being viewed at her new hospital.  I wonder if she’s made any changes to how she joins the staff.  
  
She came into Seattle Grace somewhat quietly but made her presence known with the Burke business and Yang. Then she went on to mess with Sloan and Shepherd.  Mark used to bitch about her, but I could see he was intrigued.  When she held the line with Bailey she didn’t make any friends.  I wonder how she will hold the line at her new hospital.  Maybe without the Yang/Burke drama she will be able to come in quietly and slowly prove herself?  Maybe she will be able to earn their respect before she has to hold the line in a situation like Bailey’s son?  
  
Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it?  She’s a world-renown cardiothoracic surgeon and a big girl.  She walked away from SGH and from me, so really it’s not my problem.  Only I feel guilty. I feel like if I had been different on so many levels on so many occasions, then maybe Erica could have left but kept a friend.  
  
I wonder how I would be received at a new hospital?  Maybe that’s my underlying question in all of this?  I don’t really have anything left to prove here at SGH and I’m done with my residency.  My family is in Miami.  
  
Even though it’s been almost 7 years, it’s still too cold and wet here for me most of the time.  I can’t sleep when my toes are cold and they are cold all the time.  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t sleep last night?  Maybe it was a Code Brown and I couldn’t sleep last night?  Tonight I am taking a hot bath and willing myself to go to sleep. It shouldn’t be that hard after a night of no sleep and a long day.  
  
 **—Callie**

 

 

 

 

 

 


	18. Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Black**_  
  
 **March 18, 2009**  
  
I felt kind of poetic tonight.  But I didn’t want to write another poem.  So I went browsing through my old poetry notebook.  I used to be very serious about my poetry writing.  I got a set of alphabet dividers for my poems and used to keep them organized.  I labeled them with a date on the bottom corner and if I updated one then I’d add a second date.  Sometimes I put a name or listed an event that caused me to write the poem.  Later when I wrote less I just shoved the poems in the front or back cover pockets, or in the front or back viewfinder plastic. Some have even been just left resting in the front loose.  I wonder about myself when I see that disintegration of form.  What was I thinking to just shove those poems in there loose like that?  They could fall out and be lost, or people could read them that had no business doing so.  What was going on in my life that I was too busy to hole punch them and put them under the correct letter in the tab?  What was the rush that I couldn’t even put them in the plastic pockets?  
  
A week and a half has passed since I last wrote.  I am in such a whirlwind.  I guess I can’t chastise my youthful self too much.  If I wrote a poem now I would likely just shove it in the notebook and shove the notebook on the shelf to try and forget about it.  If I wrote a poem now, I wouldn’t be able to face the pure emotion that would come with it.  Which is why I went searching for a poem that I already wrote to try and quantify this moment in time.  
  
Neva started to see me too.  It wasn’t just that I noticed her.  It wasn’t just accident that she showed up in various public parts of the hospital more frequently.  She told me that she’s been leaving the PICU more often since Chelsea’s death, and more specifically to see me—since meeting me.  Yesterday we had an intense discussion about our jobs within the hospital and it was a mutual admiration society as we talked about how hard the other’s job was and how we wouldn’t/couldn’t do the other’s job.  
  
It ended with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.  Which I quickly returned.  It wasn’t awkward.  I was tingly and giddy and very un-Hahn-like.  And I didn’t care what it meant or that others might see it.  I just cared that I had a special connection to someone.  I realize that once again it is some kind of unspoken something.  But it’s mutual and it didn’t cause a huge problem.  Today we saw each other at the coffee cart and I bought hers so that she wouldn’t have to wait in line.  Our fingers brushed as usual when passing the coffee, but nothing else was changed.  
  
I don’t know what this is, but I feel good about it.  
  
I couldn’t find a poem to suit my exact mood, but I found one from college when I was similarly confused, although I was pretty depressed about it.  Right now I don’t feel depressed, instead I feel like I am recovering consciousness after I was in surgery. I feel like I am sorting through what was dream and nightmare and deciding who I really am instead of who I became when caught up in circumstances at Seattle Grace and with Callie.    
  
 I don’t know what my final thoughts will be on all of this, but I’m okay with that.  I am glad that going through this swirl I am in a better place than I was when I wrote this poem.  It comes close in some ways though.  
  
‘black’  
  
in the black everything swirls and mixes  
conversations come only in snatches  
I reach and feel everything pulls away  
I rest and hear the goblins rush to my side  
in the darkness now I sit in confusion  
I teeter on the edge swallowed by the swirl  
just when I think I know everything seems to go  
as a great gust of wind shakes my house of cards  
pushing confusion through my door  
windows of knowledge rattle in their fragile panes  
in dark black of the night my whole world shakes  
again I am confused what I knew is obsolete  
goals are unreachable and unwanted if attained  
black can cut like a knife or heal through the night  
but in the black everything swirls and mixes  
  
What a dark girl I was.  It’s so weird to go back and try to understand those feelings and moments from so long ago.  I really felt hopeless if I thought that my goals were unreachable and unwanted even if I attained them.  I am so glad that those kind of moments didn’t linger overly long and I was able to stick to my goals.  Indeed I clung to them for great periods of my life so that I could get through all the other stuff that created this black swirl in my mind.  
  
I have to say I’m so glad I wasn’t additionally confused about women growing up.  Maybe my ignorance was a blessing in that I wasn’t also worried about whether I was or was not into other girls, and whether that was or was not okay with friends and family.  maybe it is just as well that I became a cardio-savant and didn’t have to deal that whole part of the equation until now.  
  
It’s rapidly becoming my catch phrase and I never wanted one, but tomorrow is another day.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 

 


	19. White

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—White**_  
  
 **March 26, 2009**  
  
Esmeralda knows Addison.  
The aliens still have Erica.  
  
Why couldn’t Esmeralda know Erica?  Then maybe Yang could have pumped her for information for me.  That would have been as sweet as my first hip replacement.  Yang could have waxed poetic about her former mentor because Dixon—is special.  And I could have pretended to roll my eyes, but secretly memorized every detail that she would have shared.  What grocery store she shops at, if her hair is still curly, if she bought a new house already, if she made friends, if she ever talked about SGH or me, or anything really that she could have said.  
  
But know.  She knows Addison.  And that’s cool and all, but I can call Addison when I want an update.  She’s even in the same time zone as I am.  Erica?  She might not even be in the same Quadrant of Space or whatever.  I mean she might have gone through some kind of alien worm-hole where they offered her drinks and food like some kind of doctor goes through the looking glass.  I mean maybe the aliens dressed her up in a blue dress with that crazy white apron.  What if instead of ‘eat me’ and ‘drink me’ to grow or shrink they had ‘win the harper avery’ or ‘get published more than Shepherd’ or ‘burn SGH down to the ground’?  She might be so happy there at the other end of the worm-hole through the looking glass that she never wants to come back.  
  
How am I supposed to compete with that?  
  
And I know Erica’s not all fairy-tale foo-foo, but she’d be hot in the Alice-in-Wonderland dress and I could just see her giving the Queen of Hearts a run for her money.  She’d take Wonderland and kick it on its ass.  And I think that Mark would be the Cheshire Cat fucking with her from unreachable spots to give her his manwhore wisdom of the world like the Sloan Method and shit, but he’d be just out of reach and she could never land that punch she’d day dream about.  Then she’d wish the ‘eat me’ ‘drink me’ things were for growing so she could reach him.  I think Izzie would be the Mad Hatter of the bunch and Meredith would be the Dormouse.  
  
What the hell is going on with me these days?  
  
It was great to have a common friend with Esmeralda.  She seemed to see me as an individual person then.  Maybe now I have some merit with her.  I guess since I’ve been pretty out of it, I haven’t made the best impression on her.  
  
But Sloan caught me staring at the surgical board again today.  I told him that I was just tired and haven’t been sleeping.  He said that I’d been tired since sometime in early November, but that he’d spare me the exact anniversary date.  I nodded at him.  I didn’t even bother to deny it or anything.  He patted my shoulder and I grabbed his hand and held it for a few moments as I took in one last look at the board.  
  
Now?  I’m home and I’m pretending that I work in a hospital modeled after Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  
  
What is this world coming to?  
  
I work with Rufio the queen of the lost boys.  I imagine that the others are from the Mad Hatter’s tea party.  And that Erica is lost in space like Star Trek Voyager or some shit.  
  
Where did rocker-chick Callie go?  And her little dog?  
  
I’d go see Dr. Wyatt, but I know that Erica used to go see her.  I feel like she’d be looking at me through Erica’s eyes and find me lacking.  I have know idea how often Erica went to see her or what they talked about.  I mean she may not have ever mentioned me at all, or not in any kind of romantic way.  She may have just been there to keep the sharp edge of her Dr. Hahn sword ready.  The Tapley surgery, the Harper Avery, and working with Burke’s left over mess—Yang—Well, that would be enough to drive me into therapy that’s for sure.  I wonder if that’s a cardio thing?  I mean I could have operated on the Walter Tapley of Orthopedic Medicine and I don’t think it would have mattered so much.  A knee replacement and an aortic valve repair with tricuspid…  Well, it was complex and dangerous and she didn’t want to do it.  She even challenged the chief.  Something that we all should have done more often it turns out.  
  
What would have happened if one of those nit-wits had spoken up?  
  
She may not have even been dismissed.  Maybe she would have been?  But who’s to say that she’s going to stick around in this career anyway?  She operated on a deer?  Who does that, I mean who does that who isn’t an actual vet?  Maybe that would have been better for her.  People seemed to be trouble for her anyway.  She was indeed becoming a good surgeon, but maybe she would have been able to love her patients and their families to death as an excellent veterinarian?  They still get to operate, suture, drug patients, and put on casts and stuff.  Would that have been such a bad outcome really?  I mean she wouldn’t have been in the day to day lives of SGH, but she could have baked muffins to her heart’s delight and sent them over, and she lived with Grey so she’d still be around.  And maybe she wouldn’t have fallen in love with anymore patients like she did with Denny?    
  
I mean she did it for love.  I get that.  What if Erica needed that heart?  Hell, I’d knock Izzie down and cut it out of her myself, forget the donor heart business.  I’d go all vigilante on her and take what my love needed.  
  
So I get it.  Izzie had an understandable motive.  But so did Lorena Bobbit, right?  That didn’t make it the right thing to do.  And what if Izzie fell in love with another patient?  The odds might be slim, but look at Karev and Eva?  
  
Maybe I shouldn’t ask the aliens to give Erica back?  Maybe I should ask for them to take me through the worm-hole to Erica’s quadrant?  I could handle the scarier aspects of the wonderland if I knew that Erica was there.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	20. Colourless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Colourless**_  
  
 **March 28, 2009**  
  
The heart, the mind, emotions—they are all colorless.  Worlds are turned upside down, lives are changed, and moments are seared into memory forever.  But when you get down to what is most important in life—that love, that heartache, and that joy—it’s all colorless.  Who knows where it all comes from or goes to, but while it changes what you see in the world and color is added to your life—deep down the most important parts can be felt with your eyes closed in the darkest night.  
  
Love is like carbon monoxide—odorless, tasteless, colorless.  It creeps in filling you up and then before you know it—you are a goner.  
  
Of course you might tell me that love is not those things.  Love is the scent of Callie’s shampoo or Neva’s perfume.  Love is the taste of coffee over lip gloss on Callie’s full pout or that it is the taste of strawberries and chocolate on Neva’s lower lip.  Love is the brown of Callie’s eyes or the green wall of jealousy I saw every time I saw her with Mark.  Or that love is the color of Neva’s sparkling jade green eyes, or the colors of the sunset that she made me stand still and watch one day.  
  
Sigh.  It is all of those things too.  
  
And yet I feel as though I am poisoned.  
  
Callie poisoned me.  She poisoned me without me even catching on.  I felt dizzy, my heart raced, my reality changed, and leaving her has left my world jaundiced.  I have been in a long tunnel and just when I start to see the world around me again, it’s like she throws a net to capture me once more.  
  
Neva is beautiful.  Her highlights on black hair fascinate me and I’m not sure why.  I try to pick out one strand of the lighter colored hair and always seem to fail in my task before her hand closes around my wrist and she pulls my attention to her.  I don’t know if her green eyes are an antidote to the poison I’ve ingested, or if they are more poison.  
  
How do you ask someone if they are poison?  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	21. Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Friends**_  
  
 **March 31, 2009**  
  
“Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected.”—Ghandi  
  
Why Izzie was quoting Ghandi again, let alone quoting it to me, let alone talking to me—I have no idea on earth.  If she’s possessed by the aliens and they have sent her to give me a message, then they have an even more twisted sense of humor than some people attribute to God.  Why is she still at SGH?  Why is she still talking and talking and talking?  And she’s been so weird.  It’s so funny—Erica left and I went all heartbroken and Izzie has seemingly gone nuts.  Well, unless you count the creepy moments of apparent clarity where she approaches the person least likely to be in her fan club and quotes freaking Ghandi.  
  
I had to call Addison about that one.  
  
I needed to call her because Esmeralda wants to talk to her again, but I needed to tell her about Izzie and Ghandi.  I expected her to laugh, but she said that Izzie quoted Ghandi to her before.  She’s kind of amazing?  I looked at my phone in shock—I did dial Addison, right?  
  
Apparently they were kind of friends when she first arrived.  Who knew?  I guess I was hanging out in the basement and avoiding Sydney then.  I rarely regret my anti-social tendencies, but in this case, I do regret not having more time with Addison.  We were good friends, but I think we could have been great friends.  Maybe Esmeralda is a good influence on me since she wants to see if we can all hang out sometime despite the fact that we don’t live near Addison.  Esmeralda scoffed at that.  ‘Distance is in the mind,’ she said.  ‘Friends are in the heart.’  
  
What the hell?  
  
Maybe Esmeralda is the alien ambassador sent to see if I’ve changed my ways?  I wonder what kind of tests she’ll give me?  Great, now I’m going to look at her as some kind of alien seer who will help me to fulfill my destiny or who will put me on another path.  
  
And Izzie? Seriously?  If she does it again tomorrow, I’m calling a Code Brown and will really kick her ass in the cafeteria so that my intentions are clear.  
  
I wonder why she’s still at SGH, but now that I think about it, maybe the question should be why am I still here?  She obviously fits in with that fiercely loyal and inbred little friend-amily group over there at Casa de Grey.  She is a favorite of some kind of the Chief.  She can operate on deer, steal hearts, and treat illegal patients out near the dumpster—but the worst she got was trailing around with Sydney and following Grey on a ‘no touch’ probationary time?  How is that possible?  
  
I admit having Sydney around would be a punishment, but seriously weighing what she did and it’s myriad of ripple effects with what the punishment was?  I don’t think she suffered enough.  
  
Maybe that’s the thing.  Maybe I shouldn’t be here.  Clearly I am disenchanted with the chief, the Grey Gang, and other than Mark I don’t really care about anyone here at all.  Not anymore.  Maybe Esmeralda, but I don’t even know her yet.  I don’t know if we will ever become friends and part of me doesn’t want to.  I think that part of me has been subconsciously packing up my brain these last few months.  I’m just now coming to understand it, but I think that I have run out my time here.  SGH and Callie Torres are not friends anymore.  The truth is—I’m not sure that we ever really were.  
  
I don’t want to admit it, but Izzie’s words are echoing in my brain.  I think I’ve had a lot of truth in the last several months.  The thing is it was given with love, but I still rejected it.  Ghandi was right, when we bring the truth it has to be with love or it will be rejected.  But the other part of that idea is that truth is a difficult and dangerous beast and even treated with love—it may be rejected.  Erica loved me.  She loved me so much that she opened up parts of herself that I am sure no one has ever seen.  She was my friend and then like a supernova she burst into my consciousness as a lover.  Even with the love and the tenderness—I rejected her, or I rejected what being with her meant for me.    
  
And my truth?  My truth to her was that I wasn’t ready, wasn’t as into her as she was to me, wasn’t able to cope and wasn’t able to treat her with respect.  My truth was rejected because it was a false message and it wasn’t given with any love whatsoever.  It’s a wonder that she was as kind and caring and trying as she was.  I know that if she had treated me the way I treated her it would not have been ‘okay’ in any sense of the word.  I’d like to blame her for being too ready, too honest, or for leaving the way she did without at least having it out and getting closure.  But the truth is, as much as I would like to blame her, I can’t.  It would have taken every ounce of self-control for me to have not run myself over if I had been her that night in the parking lot.  
  
It wasn’t like things were all leaves and flowers with us, and then the crap with Izzie.  I took or appeared to take the side of Izzie Stevens who was less than a friend, and I betrayed my lover, my best friend, and myself all in a matter of seconds, heartbeats, or eye blinks.  I blinked too hard and the house of cards fell on me and Erica was beamed up by the aliens and Izzie Stevens began to lose her mind.  
  
If the aliens do not give Erica back and Izzie is really crazy, then I need to get the hell out of here or there won’t be anyone left standing.  
  
Aliens please, if you’re trying to send me a message, can it be from Esmeralda and not Izzie?  I don’t want to miss any important information and she seems to be losing her mind.  Please.  I’m obviously a little slow with figuring all this out.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	22. Enemies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Enemies**_  
  
 **April 2, 2009**  
  
In fifth grade I ‘went out with’ a boy named Larry.  I spent every afternoon at Jessica’s house and we rode bikes.  Because she was a good friend and her sisters were annoying and Larry was nice to her—we would go visit him.  Everyday my best friend, boyfriend and myself rode bikes and jumped off curbs and dodged cars for sport.  It was a magical time between school getting out and darkness falling.  
  
No parents.  No rules.  Just sunshine and sweet smiles.  
  
It wasn’t weird for me that there were three of us.  I wonder now if it was weird for either of them.  Maybe in the Callie-Mark-Me triangle I was Jessica?  Maybe Jessica watched me with Larry like I watched Callie with Mark?  Maybe I ripped Jessica’s heart out the way Callie ripped mine?  
  
There was no kissing.  No hand holding.  It was just a simple ‘will you go out with me?’ written on a piece of paper and a shy ‘Y’ written back.  And yet it was one of the sweetest, most caring and honest relationships I’ve ever had.  
  
Yeah, yeah it was fifth grade and I may have unknowingly trampled on Jessica’s heart, but the part that was between Larry and I was simple. Perfect even.  At least in hindsight.  
  
What if grown up love was like that?  ‘Dear Callie, Will you go out with me?’  And a simple but honest response, ‘Dear Erica, Would love to, but that freaks me out.  Maybe later when I have my head on straight.  Or at least know what the hell I want.’  
  
‘Dear Callie, Sure.  Friends, right?’  And the longed for reply of, ‘Y.’  
  
Really complicated doesn’t have to mean that things have to be hard right?  I mean heart surgery or even orthopedic surgery—it’s complicated, but it’s not hard once you’ve learned it and done it.  Anesthesia to the right amount, oxygen, heart monitors, cut, work, stitch…  Complicated, but you just follow the steps and you make it happen.  Why does love have to be so hard?  Why do I sound like love-sick radio re-runs?  Love.  Do you like me Y/N?  Do you like me in a kiss me kind of way Y/N?  Do you like me enough to tell other people that you like me Y/N?  Do you want to give it a try then Y/N?  It should be like that right Y/Y?  My god I’ve been thinking about 5th grade and talking to my nephew on the internet too much.  What is it with this Y/Y and all those abbreviations.  I had to get his mother on the line to decipher his latest message.  And when I did he sent me another one in standard English that said, “Aunt Erica, That was epic fail calling in my mom to translate.”  
  
If Callie had been as straight forward as Larry, then maybe things would have gone better.  Maybe.  And if maybe things had gone better, not like fairy tale ending or any of that crap, but just clearer.  Maybe then I would know what to say to Neva.  
  
Because I need to know what to say to Neva.  
  
Because when I kiss Neva she looks at me and her eye ask for more and I am uncertain of whether or not I CAN give her more.  So I leave it there.  No hand holding.  Except there has been kissing.  And because of that it’s not all sunshine and smiles anymore.  
  
Her eyes ask me, ‘Can you love me, Y/Y?’  
  
And my heart and stomach conflict in a ‘Y/N’ response that it so unfair to both of us.  
  
I worry about it not only because Neva is a wonderful woman who deserves all the love a person could possibly give her, but I also worry because as simple as Larry was, it still changed on a dime.  
  
One day in class Corrinne decided that Larry should be her boyfriend and so they swooped him up.  Claiming him into their circle in the room as we watched a science video.  The girls brushed his hair a different direction and Corrinne put her arms around him and looked at me with a predatory look in her eye.  
  
I talked to him once after that.  He said he felt like their pet.  I said that I was sorry for him.  He smiled at me sheepishly.  Corrinne came and claimed him then.  She declared herself as my enemy and made him say the same as well.  
  
I’m not sure to this day what she put in his kool-aid, but having him as an enemy was much worse than him being her boyfriend.  I was glad that he left the following year and I could pack my memories of sunshine and smiles away in a box.  
  
I just.  I just didn’t want Mark to make Callie my enemy.  Or for her to make herself my enemy and I wonder if I had stayed at SGH if that would have happened next.  
  
I wonder if I say yes to Neva, if ultimately I will have to change my reply to no.  
  
I wonder if I will make another enemy out of sunshine and smiles.  Those are some pretty powerful enemies to have and they weigh on your heartstrings like nothing that has ever come before them.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 

 

 


	23. Lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Lovers**_  
 __ ****  
April 7, 2009  
  
Girl trouble.  I can’t escape it.  Even if my mind is clear for the day or the week—finally.  No, I’m friends with the Seattle Grace Manwhore and if I’m not having girl trouble he is.  Or really he’s not which is his trouble.  Since Lexie dumped him, and he turned over that new leaf he’s had nothing but girl trouble.  Karev made some snide comment today over a cheerleader’s ass about.  He was kinda trying to be caring or sensitive in his male-bonding cave man kind of way.  Still it came out as a question like this, “Dude.  Did you see the new scrub nurse?  Her ass is hot.  Her scrubs are as tight as Callie’s.  I want them to stand next to each other and just pretend to like each other.”  Mark glared at him and waved his double board certified status in his face and for his defense.  Karev did not get the hint.  Seriously, I don’t know how he could miss it.  It’s not like Mark brings up his high-falluting academics all the time.  Addison or Erica—I could see them making sure a person has their titles right, but not Mark.  Anyway, Karev continues, “What’s wrong with you, man?  She’s a hot as Callie and I know you’d hit that.”  If Mark wasn’t busy fixing rah-rah's ass I think he might have taken Karev to the floor despite all of his ‘I’m a wrestler’ glory.  
  
So he adds as a quieter thought, “No lovers makes you cranky, or what, man?  I’m sorry.”  
  
That was the longest 2 hour surgery I have ever been a part of.  I used to like hanging out with them.  Their brains are wired differently from everyone else’s and I regard that as a good thing.  Seriously they talk about tits and ass with no apologies and they give an honest, though critical assessment of every female form that enters the hospital.  When I need is she hot, how should I ask her out advice—I’m totally going to them first.  Mark saying that Erica crying after the sex was a compliment?  That was total insight.  His other insights got me in trouble, but they were useful too.  
  
Just I can use his insights to select and pursue someone, but once I make contact—no more Sloan advice.  I didn’t read the fine print last time.  It looked something like this though:  Relationships might unofficially begin before either party realizes it and this gray area of carry over from friendship to relationship may cause severe miscommunication and brain malfunctions; failure to detect this borderland between friendship and relationship may cause one to act as if single, when really they are part of a couple; the inherent dangers in this instance are that relationships may end before they begin because of single minded decisions in a couple minded relationship space thus causing a relationship to end before it ever actually begins in earnest.  
  
ZOMFG.  You’d think as a doctor with as many rules, liabilities, and legal jargon running around—that we’d all pick up on that.  Maybe it’s why Sloan is the way he is.  No commitment whatsoever—No gray relationship borderland to fuck up.  Only he still manages to have girl troubles, so I can’t be too jealous, right?  
  
After the surgery Mark and I head down to the cafeteria to sit far away from the Grey Gang and George’s pigeons and Izzie’s Ghandi quotes.  He steals some of my chips and crunches quietly. I almost feel like I’m eating lunch alone, which is kinda cool and kinda weird.  I’ve had a good week and so no demons are haunting me, so the quiet camaraderie is quite nice.  
  
“They aren’t lovers, if you don’t love them.”  
  
I swallow my water hard.  Uh oh.  The new leaf part of Mark has spoken and it doesn’t sound happy.  
  
“If there’s no love, then there are no lovers.  I think, Callie, that you’ve had more lovers than I have.  Erica and even George.  I think my only lover was Addison.  Now, that is fucked up.  Addison and I shared love, but it was dirty and ruined before it began.  She was with Derek and love can’t come from that circumstance.  Then we tried to make a go of it in New York and I cheated on her.  I cheated because I knew that our love would be destroyed anyway.  I knew that it was a matter of time.  Before she looked at herself and looked at our love and realized where it had come from.  She would recognize that painful place, that truth and she would end it one day.  I think I always knew that.  And yet, I wanted to not care.  I wanted to continue the way I had been going on before.  I think that’s why it took me so long to understand.  And then I go and start to understand it a little with you because of your crazy sex-only marathon over Erica.  What a bad place for understanding to begin, but it’s just as well because I turned over my new leaf and struggled with it, as you know.  But now I know—I certainly don’t need any more latches on my belt and I can be with just one woman—even Lexie can acknowledge that.  Callie, I want a lover, not lovers and I want to be done with this stuff.”  
  
CODE BROWN.  MARK SLOAN.  SOLO CODE.  CODE BROWN.  
  
I thought that my head might explode.  Did he just tell me he kinda was falling in love with me, when all that shit was going down?  Or was he telling me that he realized I only wanted him for sex and that made him think about his own shenanigans, especially with the whole nurse’s strike and canceled surgeries thing?  
  
He’s right though.  I have had Erica and even George. I had Ricardo and Samuel as well.  There was love there for a time.  Samuel ruined it and made it something dirty, but listening to him talk about the wild west when I didn’t care just to see his eyes sparkle—that was love.  And letting Ricardo take the time to help me re-build myself?  That was love and it didn’t get tarnished.  It was just right—a single serving of love or something not a whole banquet.  He and I needed each other for that time of our lives in order to make it special and sweet.  I hope that Ricardo is a father by now.  He’d make an excellent one.  George.  Well, it was love.  He brought me out of the basement and I brought him out of his Meredith coma.  Too bad it was only a snack size love that I thought was a whole banquet of love.  Maybe if I had read the fine print on that one, it would have been easier to understand.  
  
Erica—she was the full five-course meal, the never-ending banquet of love…  Hell, she was the whole restaurant and I just didn’t see it.  I thought she was a batch of French fries that I could nibble on as I saw fit and then leave there and come back to after I had something else too.  
  
But she was all I needed.  I know that now.  She was the new, scared, constant, never-ending, loving, understanding, sexy, challenging and equal person that I needed.  She offered herself up to me completely and I didn’t get it.  So she packed up all of it to a corner of her mind and she left me standing here cold French fry in hand to figure out what just almost happened to me.  
  
I hope that she hasn’t unpacked that corner of her mind for anyone else yet.  I hope that she has not become a lover again already.  Maybe like me, she has tried to move on and process and even been with another like I was with Sadie and Arizona, but I hope that she has not brought out the love just yet.  
  
Like Mark said, “I want A lover, not lovers and I want to be done with this stuff.”  
  
A lover—just one and that’s it no more chasing or pursuing or wasting time.  
  
Keeping that lover will be the new challenge, the new learning curve.  
  
Oh, I got a call from Dr. Elliot back at UCLA, he said they are looking for a new Orthopedic Attending and that the opportunity is a good one since the head of ortho will be retiring in a few years.  I could get a new hospital with some people that I know, maybe have a chance at being the department head in a few years and be close to Addison.  I always liked California and if I lived there again I could find my old hang outs and maybe actually enjoy the beach.  
  
I’ll have to consider it.  I looked back through my entries and I’m not happy here.  And if I’m not happy here—how can I hope to find happiness here?  
  
The aliens can deliver Erica to Los Angeles, right?  
  
—Callie

 

 

  
 

 


	24. Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie and Erica's journals. (Callie odds. Erica evens.)

_**Fanfic 100—Family**_  
 ****  
April 11, 2009  
  
I want simplicity and clarity in my life.  I don’t mind complicated as long as people realize they have to go step by step so that complicated it not hard.  
  
I have realized that family is the ultimate in complicated hard.  
  
Watching Chelsea’s family I can see how simple it is to love completely and simply.  Her parents and friends loved her for everything that she was and mourned everything she would not get to be.  It was very simple.  They loved that she sang, painted, read books, and never complained.  They loved that she wanted them to be okay even when she was patently not.  
  
That is not hard.  It is painful to lose someone you love so completely.  However even that is simple.  When your daughter, your best friend, or lover dies, especially so young—it is simple—there is a hole in your existence.  Life is simply, irrevocably changed.  
  
Was it simple because this was a life or death situation?  There was no time for petty concerns or missed opportunities.  
  
I know that family is complicated and that family members make things hard for each other.  It shouldn’t be that way.  If everyone was an honest about their love as they are under the shadow of death, then maybe family could just be simply love.  
  
When I began this journey of self-awareness with Callie and now with Neva, I felt the pull of family on me.  I’m sure that Callie did too.  I mean she couldn’t even handle when I made it clear that I realized I was into women so much.  She ran out in a hurry and then slept with Mark.  I was overwhelmed with my realization at the time, it wasn’t until later that I realized that I would need to worry about work, friends, and family.  
  
All through moving here and figuring myself out I couldn’t shake the feeling that as much as I wanted to worry about those things—I couldn’t and didn’t need to.  When it comes down to it my attraction to women goes beyond just Callie and it’s pretty simple.  It might be complicated because other people have a hard time with it.  However that did have to make it hard.  
  
Figuring out if my attraction to Neva is more than skin deep—that I admit is hard.  
  
Well, harder than it should be.  
  
Do I like her?  Y/N  
Do I like her enough to tell the world?  Y/N  
Do I like her enough to start a family?  Y/N  
  
Oh yes, I have decided that I want to start a family.  I saw the pain of Chelsea’s family, but I also saw love that was able to break through all of that suffering and remain pure.  I want that.  I want the simplicity of that, the pureness of it, and the certainty of that.  Yes, it could crash and burn and end in misery like Chelsea’s family is going through right now, but I don’t think they would go back and change things.  I don’t think they would go back and not have Chelsea.  I don’t think that they would have put her in a care facility earlier.  I think that they would have loved her and took care of her just as they did.  Simple.  Family.  
  
Have I healed enough from my time with Callie to enter into a new relationship?  Y/N?  
  
A family.  I’m 41 now, recently defined lesbian, single, new in town, and I want to begin a family.  I guess I thrive on adversity:  member of the minority in med school; one of the few, the proud, the cardio in my career; and now late bloomer lesbian that wants a family an unsure of the two women that were/are in her life.  Talk about stacking the deck—and not in my own favor.  I thought working at Seattle Grace was my greatest challenge to date, but I can see that with the adrenaline worn off and the time to forget the pain—I need a new adrenalin high in my life.  Do I go back or do I go forward?  I am considering another co-worker/friend relationship.  What did I learn from my mistakes?  Or is that a sign that I haven’t learned from them at all?  Or a sign that Callie wasn’t a mistake, but just a mess, and that I am trying to re-create that here in my new hospital?  
  
Once again tomorrow is another day.  And I am now beginning to realize that it is another set of questions, each more perplexing than those that came before it.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	25. Strangers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Strangers  
**_  
 __ **April 18, 2009**  
  
I’m going.  I went to see Dr. Elliot back at UCLA and I’m going back.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  Can you go back somewhere that you left?  I think that you can.  I wasn’t who I am now, so it’s not exactly like I’m going back just so.  
  
I’m an attending not a med school student.  I’m a lesbian and back then I just assumed I was hetero because I didn’t know any different.  I didn’t know what I was capable in the OR then and now I do.  I can rock out in any ortho surgery—even new experimental ones like building that guy’s legs.  I have come to terms with the losing end of my specialty and being a surgeon in general.  He did not survive, but the ortho procedure was sound.  I have figured out some things about my personal life and how I want it to go in the future.  I am Callie the older and wiser coming back, not Callie the curious and unsure that I once was.  
  
It was good to see Dr. Elliot, he was one of my favorite people there.  Even though we knew each other it was like we were meeting as strangers.  When I was here previously there were lines between us of status and where we were in our lives so we really didn’t know each other that well.  We saw each other almost every day at the hospital, but it’s kind of like me seeing Derek every day.  I really don’t know that much about him, except what I know through Meredith and Christina.  And Dr. Elliot did not have a Meredith or Christina, that’s for sure.  
  
I like the idea of familiar faces that are still strangers.  There is a wonderful thing about seeing someone familiar that you had a vague positive impression of, but them really being a stranger to you.  I think it’s because I can be who I am now a little easier.  I won’t fall into old habits or feel like they are looking me like I was George’s wife, Izzie’s enemy, Mark’s conquest/friend, and Erica’s maybe lover.  No, I can be Callie the new Orthopedic Attending.  When they get to know me, they’ll know that I am a relatively new lesbian and still recovering from my first girl heartbreak from a girl named Erica.  The rest is just extra information not really anything for them to worry about.  At SGH the significance of being married is more because I was married to one of our own.  The same with Mark Sloan—it’s no big deal that I had sexual liaisons with a co-worker, but at SGH everyone knows Mark so it’s different somehow.  
  
Being new, being a stranger is like keeping the same facts about myself, but shaking the etch-a-sketch to shake off the unnecessary details.  I don’t want to re-write the facts.  However ugly they are, they got me to this point.  I can’t change them because to change them may mean that I never had any time at all with Erica, and I’d rather have the pain of her loss, than the emptiness that not knowing her at all would surely be in m life.  
  
I wonder.  
  
If I ever met Erica again, could we meet as strangers?  Not take away the facts, but maybe remove some of the mess.  I never meant to hurt her, I didn’t think about her, which is almost worse than hurting her on purpose.  My actions made it seem that she wasn’t even important enough to consider in my actions.  
  
The fact was it was like a kid who learned a new insult and reveled in saying it, but didn’t think about what it really meant or how sensitive other people were that the kid said it to.  It was like I discovered my body could react to a woman and I just wanted to find out if my body could/would still react to a man.  And I knew that I didn’t care for real about Mark, so I could go and find out.  Like opening the refrigerator to see if the light still works.  I didn’t mean to waste electricity or choose what was in the frige over what was being brought to me by the beautiful woman at the dining table—I just had to open the door and see if it still worked.  
  
I know that doesn’t make it okay.  I know that the message I sent was loud and clear that I didn’t care, or that I didn’t care enough.  I know that I betrayed our promise to be scared together.  I know that I freaked out and ran away when she had her break through.  
  
I’m not trying to make excuses—it was wrong.  However I wish that I could come to a place where I could explain to her and she knew it wasn’t an intentional hurt.  It’s been an important life changing lesson for me and I wish I could take some of the sting out of what I did to her.  
  
Chief has been great.  Two weeks and I’m gone.  Addison has been supportive.  We hardly ever talk but still seem as close as ever when we do, so she’s letting me stay with her for a bit when I first get there until I can find an apartment.  Christina, for someone who doesn’t speak girl and isn’t my friend, has been quite sullen about the whole thing.  I think she’s ready to get out of here as well between Preston, Hahn, and now Dixon…  I can’t blame her.  I hope that she finishes her residence strong and gets to get out of here, if that’s what she wants.  
  
Ok, aliens.  In two weeks you can deliver Erica to Los Angeles okay?  UCLA Med or even the Oceanside Wellness Clinic.  Hell, there are a ton of hospitals down there.  I’m sure I could find her if you at least put her in the 50 mile radius or something.  
  
Please.  
 **  
—Callie**

 

 

 


	26. Teammates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica
> 
> If you were trying to read yesterday, then I apologize. I got off kilter on the numbers and entries when I was transferring and then AO3 has been experiencing downtime, so could barely delete the bad ones and walk away. Hopefully, there will be no glitches today.

_**Fanfic 100—Teammates**_  
  
 _ **May 3, 2009**_  
  
     Where did the days go? I guess I just kept saying tomorrow is another day until suddenly I looked at the calendar and it was May. Neva returned from Europe last week and we haven’t talked much. I buried myself into work while she was gone so that I didn’t have to think about the progression of things. Having her back at work is nice, but I had thought we’d hang out more. So my time is free and I have only me to spend it with. I guess I’ll be doing some of that thinking after all.  
  
     I cannot go back in time anymore than I can go back to Seattle. I have come too far in my career and even personally to go backwards. My decision is made by default and now my question is whether that is good enough or not. Callie isn’t here and I’m not foolish enough to go back for her. Neva is here and we work well together. I don’t know if that is enough. Or if it is supposed to be enough.  
  
     Callie and I played darts and other games. Doing things with her felt like we were teammates. Although I have to say that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes I felt like I was sat on the bench and she was playing the game. Like Callie had other teammates, but I just had Callie. Until the end I knew I could count on her after a rough day of surgery, in a game of darts at Joe’s, and even walking the halls of Seattle Grace. I knew she was friends with Cristina, but she did help me avoid her when I needed to. Callie made everything a game when she wasn’t freaked out. We had a lot of fun, which wasn’t something I was used to doing with co-workers or really anybody. I was always so serious that it was hard for people to know how to play with me. Callie always knew how to challenge me though.  
  
     I like that teammate camaraderie. I miss it. But I didn’t like that Callie had other teammates as well, because I didn’t think I was on their team. People like Sloan were not on my team. It wasn’t jealousy, well, I mean part of it was. You know when they were sleeping together, but I wasn’t jealous like Callie shouldn’t have friends or whatever. I guess I just wanted to be special to her.  
  
     Maybe teammates is not what I want to have with a person?  
  
     Partner might be a better word. Team always implies a few people playing a game, whereas partner implies one other person besides you. I want a partner in life, but I want to have the playfulness and fun as well. Is that too much to ask? Am I wanting something that doesn’t exist and that’s why I’m having a hard time allowing myself to partner with Neva?  
  
     Not partner like gay marriage. We are very far from that, but I keep hanging back in the pursuit of Neva. With Callie it took almost 3 months to get from our first kiss to almost dating, but part of that was because we were both freaking out and avoiding each other. Neva and I have been approaching relationship since late March, but we are going slow mostly because I am holding back. I know it. She knows it. Neither of us is worried about being attracted to a woman, we have each already experienced that.  
  
     She is a wonderful person. I don’t want to hurt her.  
  
     I just don’t know if I can be a teammate let alone a partner to her.  
  
     I guess time will tell and as I’m not going backward, I might as well go forward. Tomorrow is yet again another day. Hopefully another piece of the puzzle and part of the picture that will give clarity.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	27. Parents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Parents**_  
 __ ****  
May 5, 2009  
  
     No matter how old you are, there are times you wish for your parents to be around. This past year has been full of those times despite the fact that I am approaching 35 and haven’t lived in the dorms for fifteen years. For all of its flaws SGH had become a dysfunctional home for me in the last seven years. It’s weird to think of Chief Weber as my fake dad, but he did try to look out for me since I was so far away from home. Sloan would be my bad-influence-older-brother. I think he would have liked that title. Maybe Addison would be my above-it-all older sister that provided me shelter in the storm. I mean she’s the only other one that I can think of that made a break after deciding that all the drama was just not worth it anymore.  
  
     I can still remember coming home that first Christmas with a suitcase of dirty laundry that my mom washed for me and how she greeted me in the morning with my favorite childhood silver dollar pancakes.  
  
     Blinded in the morning because Addison’s guest room curtains are substandard is nothing like coming home. I do not feel that security of everything is going to be all right. If I just ask there will not be anyone to make me a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup to feel better.  
  
     I guess in that sense I feel like I have run away from home and have clung on to the refuge of my older sister who really doesn’t have the time or interest to take care of me.   
  
     And why should she? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not upset with Addison at all. I’m just trying to categorize what this is. Granted this is not the same as eating Chinese take out in an empty apartment that we can barely afford to pay the electricity bill. No this is so much better.  
  
     My parents found out that I was gay during the move. They weren’t even here and they managed to snoop around. I certainly did not want to have this conversation on the phone across 3,000 miles, but they wouldn’t let up on the questions. Why was I moving? How come I was so sad all the time? Is there a boy in LA? How long are you living with Addison? It was never ending and I finally just blurted out that SGH wasn’t the same since Erica left and I could finally see all the things that were wrong with it that she had seen. The silence on the other end of the line was deafening. I thought that there was an electrical problem or cell phone tower problem, but as I was dialing and dialing and dialing them back, Addison called me. I knew that there was no problem. I tried to tell myself that the problem was in Florida, but my stomach knew the truth. I called Natalia in Miami and couldn’t even talk to her. I should probably call her back now that I’m here.  
  
     Maybe it’s better that I had this conversation on the phone?  
  
     I don’t think I want to know what their faces looked like. I’m sure that I don’t want to know what it’s like for them to turn their backs on me and walk away. This way, well, the phone just went dead, right? Maybe there was a hurricane and Florida fell off into the ocean? I mean, if the aliens can take Erica, then it could happen right?  
  
      Maybe I could get the aliens to pick up my parents and take them away? Re-program them or something. You know with that red-flashing light device from Men-In-Black. It could happen.  
  
     Sigh. I could tell Addison was thrilled that I found an apartment. She has tried to be gracious, but I know that she’s trying to make it work with Kevin. I’m sure that it would be difficult to work on a struggling relationship when you have a life-sized woman kept as a pet in the upstairs guest room.  
  
      Ha. I mean it would be like trying to have a relationship with Erica while still living with Cristina. That would have been all kinds of awkward and angsty. I would have tried to keep Erica from coming over when Cris was home and vice versa. The peace would have been disturbed on so many levels and then a cease-fire would have had to have been declared. I don’t know what I was thinking when I moved in with Cristina right when I was trying to start something with Erica. I mean I know that I couldn’t live on Cris’ couch forever, but the two did not go together. I really wasn’t thinking ahead on any level.  
  
      Man. I thought time was supposed to heal all wounds and all that shit. I just keep figuring out ways that I screwed up. What was Erica thinking to even have started up with me? I’m glad the aliens took her away when they did. I mean if she had stayed at SGH what would have been next? Seriously. At least with her gone I could just bumble around on my own and not hurt her anymore.  
  
      I move into the apartment in five days. At least I don’t have to pack really. I just put it all in boxes in Addison’s garage. I feel bad because she can barely get her roadster in and out of there. Oh well. It’s only a few more days.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	28. Children

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Children**_  
 __ ****  
May 9, 2009  
  
     Children have amazing instinctual coping devices. Their innate ability to gravitate away from the unpleasant and to see what they want to see is admirable. In hospital I have seen them mentally wrap their heads around situations in their own way that adults cannot absorb. It comes so natural to them that it’s like you could blindfold them and they could walk through the obstacle course. That’s not to say that kids don’t get hurt or suffer. Of course they do. How they handle it is amazing.  
  
     Too often as adults we see only the negative, the fear, or limiting condition.  
  
     Children are often able to find the positive in the situation, even while accepting the negatives.   
  
     As a child I believed that Bambi's mother had simply abandoned him. Yeah it sucked but that was how my brain processed it. I'm not sure what that means regarding my psychological disposition at the time. I mean who thinks it's better that he was abandoned instead of murdered? I guess in that scenario at least she was alive and could always come back to her senses.  
  
     I also remember how even as a young child I would try to tailor my wants, needs and desires to what was within our grasp. We were not well to do by any means and so when it was my birthday or Christmas I made sure to not want very much. I did want whatever my mind selected very badly. One year, I must have been six, I wanted a ring with my birthstone in it. Many of the other girls had them and they taunted me from the counter at the drug store. I didn’t want the earrings or the Barbie or the operation game or the fancy new clothes that Shelby had two doors down. No I instead I wanted just the cheap imitation ring. If I just had that I'd be all right. I could pretend I didn't want any of those things. I could pretend I was rich because I got the one thing I wanted. Not in the greedy I want this and this and that of way but in the bare minimum to survive kind of way.  
  
     Chelsea did the same with her disease I realize now. If she could sing then it was okay that she couldn’t play soccer. If she could play piano then it was okay she couldn't dance... She focused on what she could do and let what she couldn't do go. She never denied how serious her condition was, but she never let it interfere with enjoying what she could do.  
  
     Not enough adults have this ability to focus and let go.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	29. Birth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Birth**_  
 __ ****  
May 10, 2009  
  
     Esmerelda came down last week and we went to the House of Blues to see her brother’s band. It was amazing to go out, rock out, and crash. We all woke up feeling like shit and had a quiet breakfast at about 2 in the afternoon. Esmerelda fared slightly better than Addison and I. She even went so far as to tell us that we were old ladies. She asked if we were going to get a cat.  
  
     I started laughing, which hurt my head. Addison was confused.  
  
     Esmerelda shook her head.  
  
     “You’re two old ladies living together on the beach and you need a cat.”  
  
     I held in my laughter and held my hand to my forehead for the pain.  
  
     Some kind of light went on in Addison’s brain and she said, “But we’re not together.” I fell of the stool and had to walk in a circle to get my balance back.  
  
     “You might not be together, but you’re not doing anything else.”  
  
     That afternoon the call came back about my apartment.  
  
     Here I am a week later sitting in an almost empty apartment. I have stuff but a lot of it is still in boxes. The walls are white, the carpet is tan, and it’s all mine. I can figure out who I am once again in this new space. Esmerelda and I went to her favorite record shop before she left and I got some posters and vinyl albums that I want to put up around the apartment. I want to go back and remember things I used to like and how I used to be. SGH really changed me and it’s good that I can see that now and figure out who I have become since I last saw myself.  
  
     I chose this apartment because it’s two blocks away from a yoga studio. I want to keep that routine. It’s a bit of a push but there’s a Farmer’s Market on Saturdays if I can get motivated to go and check it out. I’m sure there’s to be moments ahead of me that aren’t great, but from this moment on there’s no more sulking or laziness. I need to take care of myself so that I can shine.  
  
     I remember when we would get a new house growing up, or just remodel the old one and I always loved having to do my room over again. I could move on from the old posters that I had and pick new ones that reflected what I liked now. I could get new sheets replacing Garfield with New Kids on the Block. I could choose the paint color—except for black—my parents never allowed that.  
  
     It’s the same now. I am born again. This apartment is symbolic of that birth with it’s white walls and empty space for me to claim and fill as my own. I can hold a space in it for the one that will eventually come along to be a part of my life, but at the same time I can appreciate the wonderful things that do come my way. Arizona and Esmerelda are two of those things that have come into my life because I have been plugging along and searching for myself. They were important because I needed them to help move me along. I guess I helped them too. I mean we each serve a function in the other’s lives. Addison right now is my refuge and anchor in this new place, but as I find my way and learn to swim again I will move on to other things. She needs someone to watch after right now I guess. It all works out.   
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	30. Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Death**_  
 __ ****  
May 13, 2009  
  
     I slept with Neva. I felt her fingers on me and in me. Her lips kissed my heart and soul and I saw only her green eyes and highlighted dark hair. With her hands on my body and my mind fully on the sensations and her I could let go. It was tender and beautiful and even a little awkward as first times usually are. Neva held me until I had recovered and was able to trace the lines of her body with my fingers and mouth. Until I could tongue my thanks into her core and let her feel the moment with me. I wasn’t able to sleep though. I tossed and turned questioning myself.  
  
     I turned on my side and traced her body through the sheet in the moonlight. My finger felt the softness of the sheet but my mind felt the softness of her body. Her hair had fallen into her face and I tucked it back behind her ear to see the easy calm she was bathed in. She is a beautiful woman. Her work, her persona, and her looks are all amazing and attractive. I’m not sure why I’ve held back, or maybe I know why, but I can’t say it.   
  
     Time is a crucial thing so wanting to spend time with someone is an important and easy way to decide how much you like them, right?  
  
     I look for Neva every day at the hospital. I know where she parks, what coffee she likes, and now I know that her body will come for my touch. Giving her pleasure made me immensely happy tonight.  
  
     Yet. I could not sleep.  
  
     All I wanted tonight was to curl up with her and be cozy. Taking the relationship the next step, coming together, so that we could be a couple. I wanted to let myself go and become the other half of this couple. I wanted there to be a couple. Her strength and dedication are similar to my own. Her compassion for others inspires me to be more open to the human aspect of medicine. She is careful with me and would not hurt me on purpose.  
  
     I don’t know.  
  
     I came home because I could not sleep and then I still cannot sleep here. I left a note and kissed her cheek as I slipped out on silent steps. I wonder what she will think in the morning. I could not help that I couldn’t sleep. It happens.  
  
     What doesn’t happen is seeing Callie at the restaurant tonight. Like a ghost.  
  
     A relationship death is not like a real death. The way it haunts you is different even as it is no less disturbing. There is a permanence about death that allows you to move on knowing that the person will not be back to write another chapter in your life. It is sad, heart-wrenching, or relieving depending on the situation, but it is final. You say goodbye to that person and they are lowered into the ground. The rest is mental as you say goodbye, think of them, remember them and honor their memory. A relationship ends and you are not always able to say goodbye and the finality is sometimes not so final because you do not feel like you’ve said or done everything that you should have been able to or needed to in order to be finished with that person. The relationship may end but that person is still out there. It is possible to have another chapter with them.  
  
     At dinner I looked away and Callie was gone again.  
  
     I don’t know what I saw.  
  
     I chose Neva. In that moment, I leaned forward and kissed her. Our first public-kiss a declaration of affection for the world and for ghost Callie to know. Neva invited me in as usual, only this time I stayed. I can still smell her on my hands and feel her on my body. I feel like she is a favorite sweatshirt that I can always put on.  
  
     So why couldn’t I sleep? Why can I still not sleep home in my own bed?  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	31. Sunrise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Sunrise**_  
  
 _ **May 15, 2009**_  
  
    _"The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what's been called the relaxation response. When you do yoga - the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body - you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the relaxation response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms."_  
  
     ~Richard Faulds  
  
     Let the healing begin then!  
  
     I like that yoga is the union between body, mind and spirit. It is so fitting that it is done at sunrise. To start the day keeping yourself in this place where you can stay relaxed about the world and meet it head on is amazing. I seem to struggle with it still, which is why I go back almost every day. A hospital is not exactly a zen-like atmosphere, but I can tell the difference. Even in Seattle I could tell the difference when I had started my day with yoga.  
  
     There were far more things to throw me off balance back in SGH though. Here in this new place there are stressful things that throw me for a loop, but for the most part I am able to keep the fight or flight response down.  
  
     The halls I walk are filled with Professional Adults that greet me. The days are filled with procedures that I have mastered. I hope to be part of the ground-breaking research that my department is known for. I feel that I have something to add here. Today I worked on the hand of a hockey player who just knew that he would never play again. He had been playing around in the street with his friends and it had gotten rough. The fingers were pretty mangled and the blood didn’t help his outlook. I took a centering breath and just talked to him the whole time that I cleaned him up and assessed the damage. He’s scheduled for surgery tomorrow since he came in so late this afternoon, but he should be able to play hockey again by the time the season starts.  
  
     He left with a smile and and I watched him go with one.  
  
     Sometimes on those good days it would be best to go straight home so that you relax into your bed after a delicious dinner with only happy things to think about. Sometimes the good day becomes a good evening too. I remember the first night that Erica, Mark and I went out. It turned into a great week. Had I gone home then it wouldn’t have turned out that way. Then again that started at the end of a horrible day, so really, it could have only gotten better.  
  
     Maybe the trick is to only go out on bad days so that the universe has a chance of making that bad day up to you?  
  
     In any case I should have gone home today and crawled into my bed to wait for sunrise and more peaceful yoga.  
  
     I should not have gone to the bar.  
  
     I should not have talked to boy!Cristina—that cardio resident named Jack. You know why do parts of old places crop up in different forms in new places? I swear that Jack could be Cristina’s fraternal twin brother only he’s younger than her. But still. I almost want her to visit and to see the two of them together. How can two people be that obsessed with cardio, that sarcastic, and that interested in tequila?  
  
     Sigh.  
  
     So I was picking at my bar napkin and thinking this place needs a dart board when he starts waxing poetic about a heart surgery he wishes he could get in on, but that it’s a Cedar. I tune out. Blah, blah, blah. The aorta. A valve. A running whipstitch. DR. ERICA HAHN. Blah blah blah.  
  
     I fist the napkin in my hand and count to ten in Spanish. It’s better that way, I can go faster and do what I want to do anyway. So much for relaxation and breathing, eh?  
  
     I stare at him but he’s just dreamily droning on about the procedure.  
  
     Then he does it again and I know I’m not hearing things. DR. ERICA HAHN. He says it in this dazed way that makes me think there is a piece of paper in his locker that has ‘Jack and Erica Hahn’ written in loopty loop letters with a heart drawn over the ‘I’. He’s gay as all get out, but he’d marry her in a heart beat I can tell from the look on his face and the timbre of his voice.  
  
     I instantly want to kill him and kiss him. Maybe in that order.  
  
     I have waited for six months for any kind of news about Erica. I don’t know why the aliens put her at Cedar, or sent their message in the form of the worst kind of hero worship that Erica could imagine, but beggars can’t be choosers and all of that.  
  
     Erica is at Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles.  
  
     I am at UCLA in Los Angeles.  
  
     My autonomic nervous system danced the hula and I ran to the bathroom to be ill. I guess I can’t drink as many tequila shots as I used to. Esmerelda was right—I am an old lady.  
  
      Significantly sobered up, embarrassed, and rattled I returned to the bar where I could grill Jack and drink water until it was safe to go home. Good thing my breathing didn’t fail me. I was able to keep it together enough that Jack just thought I was a Hahn fangirl like himself.  
  
     I arrived home late and poured myself into bed.  
  
     It was no use. I can’t sleep. I know that she is within an hour’s drive from me and I cannot subdue my mind.  
  
     Sunrise and yoga cannot come soon enough. I need to really focus on being present in my own body until I can figure out what the universe is opening up for me to do. Is it a test? Am I supposed to bite at this opportunity or is there something better on the horizon?  
  
      Aliens. You have a twisted sense of humor. Thanks anyway.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	32. Sunset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Sunset**_  
 __ ****  
May 21, 2009  
  
     The colors over the ocean at sunset today fit the glorified description of all the tour books about California. The Beach Boys would have written a new song and the Mama’s and the Papa’s were sure to have been California Dreamin’. I sat near a burned area that seemed to show the effects of too much alcohol on a bonfire. The ring was three feet in diameter but the burn area was easily five feet. An abandoned ice chest seemed to have escaped the burn, but was not carried away in the evacuation either. I kicked it to make sure there was nothing weird inside or any creepy crawlies and then I sat on it.  
  
     I just sat there.  
  
     The waves come into the shore with a steady rhythm like a heart pumping blood. No two waves are the same and yet they all fit within the parameters of the ocean. Listening you could not distinguish between them. You can hear each crash and the pulling of it as it goes back out to sea, but you would likely not be able to tell the length of the wave across or how it crested. Those differences are for the eye to pick up. The heart is almost opposite. You cannot see it readily like the ocean, instead you have to listen to it. Find an irregularity of some kind. You listen for the subtlest of murmurs. Small fluctuations like the differences in the waves are not a problem.  
  
     The surface of the ocean hides another world that we cannot see until we go beyond our existence on the shore. The chest holds a vast array of systems working together with the heart in the middle of it all, but again we cannot know it until we go inside and take a look.  
  
     A few surfers were catching the last of the sun’s rays as I sat on my make-shift perch. Idly I wondered if they were here to catch the sun’s first rays as well. Part of me envied them in that way. Doubtless they had lives with jobs, families and stressors of their own, but from my view they were surfers. The kind of people who live for the water and perhaps work in a profession or job related to the ocean in some way. In my imagination they were people who could talk about being one with the board, finding peace, and surfing for the enlightenment not the adrenalin. They waited for the right waves sitting on their board near enough to talk to each other. I did not catch any words, but occasionally the sounds would carry on the breeze toward me.  
  
     I sat so long that the seagulls gave up on asking me for food.  
  
     The sun was an orange circle in the purple, red, yellow, and even green haze above the ocean. I’m not sure if they are rightly called clouds or if they are just part of the southern California smog. It is beautiful though. Sunset is the end of the day and the beginning of the cooling of nightfall as the moon rises. Neva has stayed over a few times and I’ve cooked her dinner. I like sharing my space with her. Somehow she occupies my space like she has always been there. My lasagna was a big hit and I’m glad to be getting back into cooking. Sharing with someone is still new to me, but something that I’ve always known I wanted to do. Neva makes it easy. Her green eyes are always gentle and open and I feel that I could let her in more and more each day. I have stayed at her place just twice more. If we go for a walk or play a game and the night is vigorous enough I can fall asleep. When I went back it was with the full understanding that if I couldn’t sleep I would head home. We played volleyball in the sand with her friends Jacob and Stacey.  
  
     The competition wore me out and I slept tucked into Neva’s side.  
  
     Last night we went for a short walk around her neighborhood and had Mexican food at Alicia’s. The hand-made tortillas are more than enough reason to eat there as well as to take a walk afterwards. It had been two nights apart and Neva pulled me into the bedroom with a hunger I had never seen from her before. Again I was worn out and slept holding Neva against my shoulder.  
  
      The week has passed by quite pleasantly.  
  
      I guess I went to the beach to give thanks in a way. Or maybe I came to ponder the way things have changed. Perhaps I was bored because I was on my own again tonight. How quickly we become used to another person. It is astounding. Earlier in the year I could only count the days and hope for the next one to be better or the next, or the next, or perhaps the one after that.  
  
      It’s important to realize that what I have with Neva is special. I want to take care of it and nurture it so that it grows strong and healthy. I can’t help that I have a nagging feeling in my brain that it isn’t as electric as Callie. I can’t help it that I know Callie and I had a different dynamic that Neva and I don’t have.  
  
      It wasn’t healthy for me to be with Callie, not the way that she treated me.  
  
      I have to let it go.  
  
      I want to focus on Neva.  
  
      I hope that my offering of time at the seaside was taken so that I can enjoy this peace. Tomorrow is another day and like my old math teacher used to say ‘it’s the first day of the rest of your lives.’ I want it to be that way—the first day of my life each day moving forward. As I sat there I put all of my uncertainties out and opened my heart to the last rays of the sun. I wanted the sun to set on them so that I could rise anew and refreshed. I took the successful swoop of a pelican as my answer.  
  
     Tomorrow never looked so good.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	33. Too Much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Too Much**_  
  
 _ **May 23, 2009**_  
  
     Erica is at Cedar Sinai. She’s been there for about four months from the looks of the website. Her photograph shows her with the long hair and cherry scrub cap so I know that it’s her old pic from Mercy. I wonder why she didn’t take a new one. It was like a slap in the face to see her again. That was the Erica that I met and got to know. I liked the shorter curls that she had later. They made her softer and suited her sideways smile that I loved so much. That was the Erica that left me though. I wonder what would’ve been harder: to see the Erica that I fell for or the Erica that walked away?  
  
     It doesn’t really matter since the old picture is on the website.  
  
     Like I would have any say in the matter anyway.  
  
     What do I do now? It’s been eight days since I went out with Jack. He got an update from his friend at Cedar about that surgery. He was so dreamy eyed about it as he told me that I started to get jealous. It was then that I realized he hadn’t even met her and it really was about hearts for him. Erica was just the means to the most amazing heart in the world. Surgery, I mean. For me she would have been the means to an amazing heart—her own, but I had to ruin it. So I just let him prattle on about the surgery because every now and then he mentioned Dr. Hahn and that was as close as I was going to get to her for a while. It’s nice that he just thought I was interested and not interested in her. I felt like an under cover cop or something—trying to get the low down on my person of interest.  
  
     I worry about myself sometimes. First aliens and now I’m an undercover cop.  
  
     I want to contact Erica. I really do. I just don’t know how.  
  
     But it’s not like she’s going to be talking to some ortho resident and hear them babbling like a love struck teenager over wanting to check out my surgical skills and then try to find me. I realize this only works this direction. I have to do it. I’m just stuck about how. Or maybe I know how, I’m just afraid of the reaction I’ll get. Rightly so I think about that reaction too.  
  
     When the aliens had her, she would have been glad to see a friendly human face after all this time. She might have needed tending to and I would have been her nightingale. I’m sure that the aliens would have only put back an Erica that would have been ready to talk to me or at least let me nearby so I could plead my case. There must have been a malfunction in their orders because they only kept her a couple of months and then put her down in LA where I might not even have found her. I wish they had kept her until I was really ready and placed her where I could more easily gage her reaction to my presence. I mean UCLA is big enough and high tech enough for her to be, right? She could easily have slotted in here and we could have run into each other at the café or the coffee cart?  
  
     I have written her an email twenty times. I’ve picked up the phone fifty times. I’ve even driven over to Cedar once. Each time I’ve deleted it, set it back down, and driven away. I concede that showing up at her hospital would be a bit much, but I’m slowly driving myself crazy. Is it wrong of me to wish the aliens had her all over again after six months of begging them to give her back?  
  
     It’s just.  
  
     Too much.  
  
     Aliens. A little help here. Please?  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	34. Not Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Not Enough**_  
  
 _ **May 24, 2009**_  
  
     I want to lose myself in those green eyes.  
  
     Is that so much to ask?  
  
     Today Neva brought me a coffee from the cart and I lost myself in the moment of the first sip. It was like she wasn’t even there for a moment. She brought my attention back to her with a gentle hand on my arm. I opened my eyes slightly dazed and a little disappointed and saw her hand on my arm as it rested on the counter at the nurse’s station. She said she had to go and I should call her later. We were set to have dinner at the Thai place on Sepulveda. I called her later said I couldn’t make it. She understood and said she’d see me tomorrow. She didn’t ask why I couldn’t make it and I didn’t tell either.  
  
     When I took that sip of coffee I was transported back to the walkway outside the chief’s office with the magnificent view of the mountains. I used to stand there and look out at the scenery and imagine all the wonder around me. I was in a heated technological temple dedicated to curing the sick and repairing the injured. Just outside I could see a frozen playground where foxes lurked about and children gasped in wonder at their first touch and sight of snow. It was so perfect to me that those two realities could exist in my head in the same moment. I loved how close I was to everything.  
  
     A few mornings Callie brought me coffee after her sunrise yoga class.  
  
     We shared somewhat quiet moments there looking out the glass and savoring our caffeine. I always could taste her lip-gloss on my cup where she had stolen a sip or two or three. She always looked so cute when I would point at the mouth of my cup and look at her with an accusing eyebrow raise. Her guilty smile was enough to melt my heart if it wasn’t already melted. I was never really upset, but it became a kind of thing between us. I always demanded payment in the form of sipping from her drink. She said that she was just tasting my drink to make sure the barrista got it right. It was for my own good. I always told her if she knew what was good for her she’d watch out. Her laugh was intoxicating. I wonder if she savored the taste of my lip-gloss on her cup as much as I savored hers? Maybe she did. Maybe she continued to steal sips from mine so that I would take sips from hers? I guess I’ll never know. I wonder if we had been able to stay together would I have demanded repayment for my stolen sips with kisses by now? I guess I’ve been gone six months now. I would have been dating Callie six months.  
  
     Today I was thinking of Callie when I savored that first sip of coffee and I was disappointed when I looked down and realized I wasn’t on the skyway with her. Instead I was at the nurse’s station at Cedar with my new girlfriend’s green eyes absorbing every nuance of my being.  
  
     Is she my girlfriend?  
  
     Nothing has been carved in stone or said out loud. Just like Callie and I.  
  
     Neva would never go and do anything as foolish as Callie even though we’ve not talked. She is amazing with kids and people. Her touch makes my body sing. I only have eyes for her. Out of all the people I have not seen in the last six months, Neva has broken through as beautiful and endearing. I have seen others as nice or human. I’ve even made connections to many like Chelsea’s web of friends and family and the Sambrano’s including their grandson Brent.  
  
     Neva would also never steal sips of my coffee.  
  
     Or hit Mark Sloan on the ass with a dart.  
  
     Then again Neva wouldn’t turn around and sleep with him…  
  
     Sigh.  
  
     Is it too much to ask for this to be enough? If I have to ask for it to be enough, then it is doomed as not being enough already? Like my relationship with Callie is it over before it has begun? Only I know it’s not over, I’ll see her tomorrow. I just mean is it doomed from the get go?  
  
     I thought I saw Callie and then I slept with Neva. Eleven days later, I’m canceling dinner, because I’m thinking how much I miss standing on the skyway with Callie trading lip-gloss smeared coffee cups and laughing.  
  
     I was not enough for Callie.  
  
     Is Neva enough for me?  
  
     Tomorrow is yet again another day and I can’t help but wonder when I will get some clarity? I was clear in moving here and getting away from Callie and SGH and the madness that was nipping at my heels. Everything else has remained stubbornly out of focus. My work is about focus and precision. Is it too much to ask for some in my personal life as well?   
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	35. Sixth Sense

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Sixth Sense**_  
 __ ****  
May 26, 2009  
  
     I wish I had a sixth sense or at least women’s intuition. As it stands now, I have these gut feelings, but they don’t seem to do me any good. I’m just sort of filled with this overarching sense of anxious dread. I had it with George and I had it to some degree with Erica, but now I really have it. With George I wasn’t sure if he was really ready and then I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t really interested in Izzie. With Erica, I wasn’t sure if I was the one that was interested and I guess I wasn’t sure if I was interested in Mark. My gut feeling in either case simply indicated stress, but not which way to go. If I had followed it with George and seen it as a negative, then I would not have married him. However, if I followed that same gut feeling as a negative, then I would not have gotten past first base with Erica at all.  
  
     Right now, all my gut is telling me is that I hit send on that email. The email I finally wrote to Dr. Erica Hahn, Cardiology, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.  
  
     My gut is not telling me that Erica will write back.  
  
     My gut is not telling me that Erica will write anything nice, if she does write back.  
  
     My gut is simply telling me that if I put anything in it, then it will probably toss it back.  
  
     Why couldn’t I have the third eye or whatever and at least have a feeling of what was coming? Part of me wants to go to a psychic or have my cards read or something. I asked Addie, but she just invited me over for cocktails. After three glasses of wine, all I wanted to do was drunk dial, but thankfully all I could find was the hospital number with her extension and I had enough sense to not bother. Addie did point out that if I called and left a message at her office, then it would be definite that she wouldn’t even read my email let alone write back to it. I finished my fourth glass of wine and agreed with her.   
  
     Well, Aliens, I don’t suppose you’ll give me a sign, will you?  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	36. Smell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Smell**_  
  
 _ **May 29, 2009**_  
  
     Roast in a slow cooker, fresh laundry and the sound of a lawnmower: those are the smells and sounds of home. Growing up didn’t have a lot of perks and it didn’t have a lot of joys, but there were certain things that happened like clockwork and I was able to take comfort in. I could work on schoolwork without being bothered and I would bury myself in books and projects creating a scholastic bubble of safety around myself. I couldn’t count on a lot of things that other kids could count on, but once a week our family would rise to its own image and we would sit down together around a table that had been in the family for five generations. I didn’t like the pearl onions and we weren’t supposed to feed the dog, but my brothers usually caused enough of a distraction that I never got in trouble for them disappearing.   
  
     When I bought my house in Seattle I thought it would smell like home. It never did and I finally came to the sad realization that I needed to make it a home on my own. I needed to make the roast and do the fresh laundry, but I would hire somebody to mow the lawn. I managed the laundry and the lawn, but I never could bring myself to put the roast in the cooker. My table was too small and too empty, the house with just me rattling around in it just never was a home. The strongest smell I ever conjured up was when I would mop the floor on a cold day with the house shut up. I always had to open the windows to get the smell out. The chill wind replaced the antiseptic smell, but just left me cold.   
  
     Most of the time I wouldn’t get off work until 6 or 7 and then I wouldn’t get home until 8 or sometimes 9. Dinners were usually brought home or out with friends at restaurants. More often than not I watched TV until I fell asleep, but couldn’t remember much about what I watched. Then it was just the next day again off and running. Tomorrow was another day must have been my mantra long before I ever even realized it. Certainly it was my motto as an intern and resident. Maybe I chose a profession that made having a ‘home’ a difficult thing? With only three hours of evening time to enjoy it sure doesn’t lend itself to the warm cozy feeling of a warm house filled with the all day long smells of cooking and laundry.   
  
     Hanging out with Callie a level of comfort developed. We hung out often, could finish each other's sentences, and we would lounge around in my living room. Sitting alone in an empty house in Los Angeles listening to the sounds of the city outside I finally realized that I had started to think of Callie as part of my home. We never had the smell of roast in the slow cooker, but we could have. I know we could have.   
  
    One time Callie told me about growing up with the smell of fresh tortillas, spices, and the sounds of the women talking in the kitchen. She loved to sneak in amongst them and steal a fresh tortilla from the stack on the counter. The string of Spanish curses falling from her lips made me smile as she quoted her mom and aunts for me. Her growing up experience seemed so much livelier and colorful than mine. The curses didn’t seem to be remembered or uttered with any mal intent. The gleam in Callie’s eye made me want to meet her family, although I’m sure that would have proved to be problematic. Callie’s ultimate problems with her feelings for me probably went part and parcel with family issues that would have had to be dealt with.   
  
    The thing is. I would have gone through them with her.   
  
     My house in Los Angeles has a lawn that gets mown every Sunday by the high school kid down the street. I occasionally can smell a roast cooking through my windows from the Polish lady next door. I always make sure that my laundry is done on Sundays as well and I take comfort in the fact that the same laundry supplies are available now as when I was a child. My table now most often has a setting for two, even if it’s still only take out or the occasional quickly thrown together meal. I am beginning to see this house as a home. I do not know if I am just better at living alone, or if having Neva here is making the difference. I did not know how deeply Callie had worked into my life until I was away from her. Will I be able to recognize it if I am face to face with what I am looking for?   
  
     It doesn’t have to be the smell of a roast cooking or fresh tortillas being flattened by hand, but what does it take to make a home? Is there a recipe to follow? I came from a lower middle class upbringing and would take almost nothing of my ‘home’ with me when I went away to college, farther away to medical school, and even further away to work. Callie came from an upper class family that didn’t want for anything, but she turned her back on the money and left to live in the basement in the rainiest city in the country. She loved her family and talking about them made her happy, but at the same time she wanted to find something different on her own.   
  
     Neva talks even less than I do about where she came from. I do not know what kind of home she grew up in. The home she lives in now is amazing. The colors and textures are all so diverse, but they flow into each other creating a whole that is filled with color, openness and a comfortable flow. Neva herself is like that. She is like water—refreshing and flexible in a way that I can’t explain. Like her the house reflects back the mood of whom she is talking to or the scene she is trying to set. I suppose some of it is the magic of well-placed lighting. Neva’s attention to details shows in everything she does and her house is no exception.   
  
     Her house does not have a food smell like I am used to associating with a home. It just has this amazing fresh smell to it. As if it somehow caught the ocean breezes even when the house was shut against the night. The smell I associate most with her home is the smell of her skin when I am tucked around her in the softest covers I’ve ever dreamed of laying in. I find myself wanting to spend time there to soak in the freshness of the woman and her home.   
  
     And yet, I can’t sleep there easily. A home should be somewhere that smells familiar, feels comfortable, and sleep comes easily, shouldn’t it?   
  
     Maybe creating a home is not a scientific process like finding the right smell, and colors, and things. Maybe a home is created when you finally feel grounded in something. Perhaps people associate smells and colors with home because they have finally put down roots in order to stay long enough to see what is around them and to soak in the smells and textures of their surroundings. I think that the three of us have barely reached a point in our lives (despite our diverse backgrounds, ages, and experiences) where we are finally starting to put down those roots. It all takes time and the slightest or greatest disturbance may mean having to start over. None of us are in the cities we first started in.   
  
     How we all ended up in LA is a mystery.   
  
     I can’t believe that Callie is at UCLA medical. I can’t believe that I opened my email to the usual barrage of pharmaceutical company emails, intra-hospital memos, and patient emails only to find the landmine of Callie Torres. I still do not have the words to reply to her, which is why I clicked past it and moved on. I swept through my day in the OR and then to my house that is slowly becoming a home. Could she be what makes this place finally a home or is it on its way to being a home and she could be what destroys it? I think I told myself that I made it up, because I forgot about it until this evening before I shut my computer down. I still did not know what to say, but I found myself going to the UCLA webpage and clicking around until I found their staff pages and ultimately Dr. Torres’ biography and picture.   
  
     I wonder what changed for her—how she left Seattle Grace and when. She has lost weight and looks fit. I find that despite the pain she caused me I am glad to see that she is doing well. I think I’m glad that she wanted to reach out to me, but I don’t know that I need to return the reach. Perhaps it should just be enough that I know she thought of me after all this time. Perhaps what she has to say wouldn’t really impact me. I know that she was sorry and on some level didn’t intend to hurt me. I don’t need to hear her say it. I don’t know if I want to know what she has gone on to do. She’s obviously successful and I don’t know that I want to think that she has moved on with someone else whether it’s male or female. Maybe I don’t want to think of myself as some kind of stepping stone in her life. Maybe I don’t want her to be that happy until I myself have moved on. Wait. I have moved on.   
  
     Oh.   
  
     That’s.   
  
     Time for me to stop writing.   
  
     It’s late and tomorrow is another day in the search for me to figure out the world.   
  
—Erica 

 

 

 


	37. Sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Sound**_  
 __ ****  
May 31, 2009  
  
     I don’t think I’m going to ‘hear’ from Erica. The only sound I’ve heard in days has been the sound of my finger clicking the refresh or get mail buttons on my computer. The ones on my phone don’t make any noise. I won’t ‘hear’ from her anyway, because it will be an email or nothing at all.  
  
     I have to accept the fact that it’s going to be nothing at all.  
  
     Suddenly my new make-over world that was bright and shiny filled with rock-n-roll posters and parts of my rediscovered and newly discovered self doesn’t seem too bright and shiny. I feel like I picked the most perfect red delicious apple that filled my hand with a nice weight, pleased my eye with a nice color, and made music to my ears with a crisp sound—only to take that first anticipated bite—to find a worm.  
  
     I feel like the Twilight cover threw up on my life.  
  
     Maybe I should just write pages and pages with nothing but the days of the week on them. Maybe I should find a forest in this concrete jungle and get lost in it. Maybe a serial killer would find me and put me out of my misery. Or I could get a reality tv show about normal people gone mad.  
  
     All week I have longed to hear Erica’s tones: laughter, snark, or explanation. Hell I’d even wrap my arms whole heartedly around the sound of her taking somebody down. Even if that meant the sacrificial lamb was Sloan. I’d eagerly sacrifice him to the ‘please let her write to me gods.’ In a heartbeat I’d throw him down the steps of the sacrificial pyramid and kneel down to accept her wrath.  
  
     Anything but the sound of this silence would be better.  
  
     I went to bed a two weeks ago happy that the aliens had put her near enough for me to find her. A week ago I went to bed hopeful that my email would garner at least a response. Today, well, today I realized that I am once again counting down to or from Erica. I have come so far in six months only to be waiting once again to hear from her. Only this time I know where she is every single day. This time I know that she is aware of my existence and desperate wish to talk with her at least once more. This time I know that she is not coming back. This time I know the aliens have not taken her.  
  
     I have to accept that she is not going to write back.  
  
     I have to accept that she has chosen.  
  
     I have to accept that she had every reason to not look back once even though I have not stopped scanning the horizon for her once in the six months that she’s been gone. I have to accept that the only sounds at night in this apartment are of my own breathing. I have to accept that I am the one to create the soundtrack that will fill this apartment with life and love. I have to accept that Erica wants no part of that with me. I have to accept that I take out the trash and do the laundry. I have to make friends beyond Addison in order to fill my table with others and share food and fun with them.  
  
     I have to accept that this fresh start was just a coat of paint on the side of my rather worn in and bumped up car of life. I have to accept the fact that now that the shine has worn off a little and I’ve taken a closer look, it’s still my old life just in a new place.  
  
      A fresh start doesn’t necessarily mean that anything is better.  
  
     Today I woke up and realized that this unicorn wonderland I had created in my mind had transformed into a dark, dirty post-apocolyptic wasteland. A place where I would have to break my back to scrape together life and live hand to mouth—let alone be able to live with any kind of gusto in it.  
  
     I look around at the white on my walls that once screamed to me of possibility.  
  
     And I see walls that will keep me locked into the sameness over and over.  
  
     I close my eyes to block it all out in blackness.  
  
     Aliens. Please. Take me away.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	38. Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Touch**_  
 _ **  
June 8, 2009**_  
  
 _charlatan: Italian ciarlatanno, alteration of cerretano, literally, inhabitant of Cerreto, Italy. Date: 1618._  
  
swindler  
  
one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge of ability  
  
cheat, con, con artist, fake, faker, fraud, imposter, mountebank, phony, pretender, quack, rip-off artist, sham  
  
  
     It has been a long time since I studied the dictionary, but I felt compelled to pull out the dog-eared red hard-bound volume when I got home. Yesterday Neva and I hit the heart of it all.  
  
     Definitions. Defining what we are, what we want, what the rules are, what the expectations should be, where we are heading, and most importantly what is in our way.  
  
     When I was small I took swimming lessons. My father used to swim in the ocean. He would disappear for hours at a time while my mom and I splashed on the shore and dozed on the blanket in the sun. He never came back from the same place that he left. The currents carried him he said, like it or not he went with them. Sometimes they were dangerous and he paddled back in earlier than other times. I never understood why he would go out there where the currents could do what they wanted with him. Why was that fun or exciting?  
  
     I was in a summer program that walked to the local YMCA and there we would learn to swim.  
  
     No parents were there and I don’t remember where the teacher was. Did she drop us off and leave us there with the unknown swim instructors? It would have likely been a lovely break on a hot sunny day. We were to learn diving, treading water and the various strokes. The day that we had to go into the deep end from the diving board ten feet above the water was terrifying. I got to the end of the board waving under the tension of my body and looked down into the dark of eyes of the swim instructor in the dark water of the deep end. I refused to jump.  
  
     A second instructor came out on the board ostensibly to coax me into the water.  
  
     I was pushed in.  
  
     I did not go back to swim lessons there for a very, very long time.  
  
     I was a good swimmer but I wasn’t sure and I was pushed. I was young, but I was pissed.  
  
     I learned to swim at the local plunge closer to my house the following year on my own terms.  
  
     The next year when I returned to the YMCA I could swim the breast-stroke from end to end until the hair on the top of my head was dry. The deep end was a place to throw rings into and dive in search of them. The diving board was a place of kamikaze joy as I cannon balled, straight jumped to the bottom, and even did a flip or two. (Which I got in trouble for.)  
  
     I feel like I did back then. The diving board is uneven with the grip tape under my feet. Above me the sky is clear blue without a single cloud. I am warm and the water is an inviting cool below me. The deep water is darker with hints on the surface of light as it hits and bounces back off. The swimmer below the diving board is beckoning to me to jump and I stand there poised with my toes over the edge and my doubts larger than life and weighing me down.  
  
***  
  
     Neva wants to make this a relationship. She has not said it, but I know it is in every pregnant pause as she chooses her words. This is love. There is no mistake. I love her. She is beautiful. I know that she loves me. She says it in everything that she does. Are we in love with each other?  
  
     I hear her saying things that I once wanted to say to Callie.  
  
     I hear her asking questions that I never got a chance to ask Callie.  
  
     I feel the reluctance in myself that I saw in Callie’s face.  
  
     I hear the back pedal in my own voice.  
  
     Neva is asking me to dive in to the deep end and I stand poised and uncertain bobbing on the board.  
  
     I once tread water for a moment while I looked up at Callie saying the inane, “The water is fine. Jump in.”  
  
     Callie wasn’t sure about the being with a woman aspect. We never got to find out if there were any other issues beyond that. I don’t think she had a fear of commitment—she did marry O’Malley. Then again maybe she had a fear of healthy relationship—after all if that was any one thing—it was not healthy. Would she have been uncertain even if I had been a man and the new thing wasn’t an issue?  
  
     Callie once told me about her relationship with George and how they had been off and on at the beginning. She talked about how she should have learned earlier on in the relationship that he just wasn’t who she needed him to be or wanted him to be. She told me about sleeping with Mark when she thought she and George were broken up. I wonder if that was just how Callie solved problems? She said she had to test a theory.   
  
     Callie was sensual in everything she did. Ortho is one of the most hands on practices.  
  
     Her touch was like a brand once I knew she had slept with Mark. I had such an overwhelming physical response to the idea of her body with his, where her hands were, her mouth and I couldn’t stand it.  
  
     I was certain. My issues had been over come. With Callie I was off the diving board and in the water once we had gotten over our initial avoiding each other. Clearly she was still uncertain and went to get swimming lessons where no one was going to push her into the pool. I don’t know if like me she wants to return and dive in or not. I don’t know anything about her now.  
  
     Except that she wants to meet, to talk, or at least email.  
  
***  
  
     Neva wants me to jump in with her.  
  
     I don’t know that Callie is an option. But if she was an option I think I would want to find out.  
  
     Can I jump into that pool and if it’s not what I think it is, can I return to the one where Neva waits treading water in the deep end for me?  
  
     Have I become Callie?  
  
***  
  
     Saturday with Neva was beautiful. We went up to Ojai and had strawberry margaritas while we listened to Mariachi music. The bed and breakfast was beautiful. The town was old fashioned and pretty with sidewalks, a nice park and less people than we are bombarded with in LA. The night was spent in making love.  
  
     Sigh.  
  
     The talking started on the car ride back.  
  
     There were no tears.  
  
     Like Callie I am afraid that we will be over before we ever start.  
  
     I would not define this. I told her about Callie’s email. I told her I didn’t know what I wanted.  
  
     I think my touch was like a brand to her as I said goodnight on her doorstep.  
  
     I fell into a black sleep that blurred into a long day and I have come home to look in the dictionary.  
  
     Why did it open to charlatan?  
  
     Am I a charlatan?  
  
     I guess I get to stew for a while. I do not have anything new to tell Neva. I have not found any words to write Callie. So I am on my own again. Only this time I know I am the one hurting someone who is extending her hand in a gesture of love because I am not sure. To make things worse, I am not sure because of a girl who said we’d be scared together and then found her own answers with someone else’s help. At least I know that I didn’t do that to Neva, but at this moment I can’t promise her that I won’t.  
  
    What if…  
  
    I write to Callie. Meet her. The chemistry is there. She is over herself and her hang-ups. She wants more.  
  
    What if…  
  
    Neva is beautiful and amazing and honest and open and and and…  
  
    Sigh. Another day begins in a few short hours.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	39. Taste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Taste**_  
  
 _ **June 9, 2009**_  
  
 **Los Angeles: one month.**  
  
Erica Email Fail: two weeks.  
  
Deciding I’m A Rock Star: DAY ONE  
  
     I finished yoga and I’m not sure what it’s all about or which positions release which emotions, but I think I’m angry. But like angry in a good way. Angry like I was before I left SGH and had just had enough. Angry enough to do something about it.  
  
     Today I helped to reconstruct a little girl’s jaw.  
  
     Poor pre-natal nutrition in an under age birth mother had meant that she started life with a terrible birth defect. Other surgeries had helped her to have minimal functions, but other problems meant that the elaborate surgery on her jaw was simply not a priority. Money of course was an issue. It always was.  
  
     I wasn’t there for any of that lead up and tragedy. In my state I’m sure I wouldn’t have been terribly useful, but today. This was the day. I had wings and I was a rock star with a scalpel.  
  
     I called Esmerelda when it was all said and done.  
  
     She laughed when she heard my music in the background.  
  
     The sun felt good and I drove along the beach highway like I didn’t have a care in the world. And for a few blissful hours walking around the promenade and then over to he beach I didn’t.  
  
     Coming home I felt that inevitable let down, but with it came the return of the anger and righteousness I felt in the morning time. I wasn’t going to let that taste of victory and freedom and happiness escape me. I couldn’t bottle it, but I could chase it.  
  
     I pulled out the posters and the rest of my boxes and I got to work. Thank god I have a light day tomorrow checking on the little girl and charting. I finally had to stop because the building security knocked on my door saying that a neighbor had called about a noise after curfew complaint.  
  
     That just made me smile and I think I scared the security guy.  
  
     Shutting the door I fell back on the couch looking at my make shift masterpiece and I laughed. Dehydrated and exhausted I may be, but I was happy.  
  
     I rocked out to loud music. I wore my Tegan & Sara concert shirt. And I ruled this apartment, just like I ruled the OR today.  
  
     Look at that, Aliens. I made a HAPPY.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	40. Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Sight**_  
 __ ****  
June 13, 2009  
  
     Sometimes I’m not sure if reading while thinking is a good idea. It’s like trying to sleep when you are troubled. The worries dance around your head and multiply as you hang onto your pillow tightly and vow to keep your eyes shut tight. Reading for distraction is one thing I suppose, but it seems that when you want to find some unrelated topic with which to settle your mind down, why then it appears that everything is about the topic you most deeply want to avoid. Every song on the radio is suddenly about you or that person or your situation. Books, magazines, and television shows are the same. Somehow your mind bends what you are looking at or goes in search of what you think you were trying to avoid.   
  
     People are the same. For months I’ve wondered about Callie and thought that I saw her from once or twice—at the worst times, when I really, really wanted to not think about her. When I first came to Los Angeles I thought I saw her at the grocery store once. I guess my mind thought that an everyday ordinary place seemed to be the most likely place that I would run into her for some reason and so my mind settled in on that. I spent a lot of time at the hospital as a consequence. I even went so far as to have my eyes checked.  
  
     Things settled down and I didn’t see her for a long time. Focus and determination go a long way I suppose. The passage of time allows for a sense of safety to build up. I suppose that’s why I reacted to the sight of her the way I did with Neva because I was clinging to what I could control and what was a real sight right in front of my face. It just hasn’t proven to be enough. I don’t understand how that is. How could the imagined sighting of someone that I tried so hard to forget overwhelm the in person, living color vivid caress of someone that I care about. For I do. I care deeply about Neva.   
  
     And yet the sight of a ghost pushed me forward when I knew better.  
  
     And one email drove a wedge between us when I didn’t want it to.  
  
     What will the sight of Callie do then?  
  
     I flipped through a quote book this evening and stopped on this one a long time. My brain wants to attach my issues to everything and so it was with this quote. I guess I wonder what love is at first sight and how it feels after three days. Is that why no one can seem to make love stay? Is this the root then of all the turmoil through the centuries and the creator of all the literature about love and loss? Beauty is great at the outset as is love and the one that we find ourselves smitten with. However like beauty it only takes time and bringing it home for it to lose its charm and its place in our life to be taken for granted. And in this way we move on wanting more beauty or love and something that once again catches our eye? Oh. What fools we mortals be, indeed.  
  
     “Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?” —Shaw  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	41. Shapes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Shapes**_  
 __ ****  
June 13, 2009  
  
     Is it wrong that I now want the aliens to take her away?  
  
     I am busy making happy. It has all kinds of shapes from yoga to walks on the beach to bottles of wine and beer at Addison’s house. I have been on fire at the hospital lately—the rock music is blaring and I’ve been operating on so many people that I’ve had to schedule time to eat. Dr. Elliot came by to let me know that he’s heard good things about my work and my dedication. It was so nice to get that kind of acknowledgment from someone that I so admire.  
  
     The girl that I worked on a few days ago has come back in for a follow up and even though she’s still healing the difference in her is so amazing. She has brightened up. Her eyes sparkle and her ponytails wiggle even more than they did. She skipped down the hallway when they left the exam room. Her parents thanked me profusely and I said that the pleasure was all mine. I wanted to thank them for the unspoken therapy that their little girl has done for me.  
  
     Happy takes all kinds of shapes, just like the sadness does.  
  
     And hope… well, that’s one of the shiftiest ones of all, isn’t it?  
  
     For nearly eight months, I begged the aliens to give Erica back or take me to her only now for me to hope and beg for them to take her away again.  
  
     I am busy making happy. I am not going to worry about the lining of my stomach or the fact that Erica has not written back. I refuse to go there. All of that angst, worry, and uncertainty is being packed into a box and left on the farthest shelf of some storage unit somewhere in my mind. With any luck I won’t ever have to go back and pull that box off the shelf and unpack it again. At least not the Erica shaped angst. I’m tired of it. Besides, I’m busy making happy.  
  
     Happy surgeries. Happy apartment. Happy dinner with Addison. Happy drinking at the bar. Happy dancing. Happy watching that crappy TV show about doctors. Happy going to sleep instead of tossing and turning. Happy to only be checking my work email twice a day and not holding my breath when I do.  
  
      Aliens, it would make me happy at this point if you took her away. I get the irony of that after all this time. You can say ‘I told you so.’ I won’t mind. Just. You were right to take her away. I didn’t understand. I do now. So please. Take her away.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	42. Triangle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Triangle**_  
  
 _ **June 16, 2009**_  
  
     Right. Acute. Obtuse. Equilateral. Isosceles. Scalene.  
  
     I know them backward and forward. I loved math before I loved science and I don’t think you ever forget your first love. I know that I certainly haven’t whether I’m speaking here of math or of people. Triangles are so important in everything.   
  
     Doctor-Patient-Nurse.   
     Parent-Parent-Child.   
     Beginning-Middle-End.   
     Airway-Breathing-Circulation.  
     Appetizer-Entrée-Dessert.  
  
     Hell. Even the three-man weave in PE.  
  
     Only in love, for me, there aren’t supposed to be any triangles. It’s okay for some people and tres interessant to discuss in a French film. Maybe even the folks on Jerry Springer like the triangle as well. Although it always seemed to end in shouting and threats of violence. And no one ever seems all that happy at the end of the French films either.  
  
     I never wanted a triangle.  
  
     I wanted to be wanted once and for that to be enough.  
  
     In high school I wanted to have that boyfriend-girlfriend relationship that lasted all four years like some of those other girls. The books were piled too high on my desk however and no one came trolling for chicks in the library. I didn’t know to want that girlfriend girlfriend relationship either, but I’m not sure it would have happened back then either. I had the kind of seriousness that was hard to shake, that youthful dedication to idealistic causes that are so pure of heart that you are blinded by them. Perhaps some small part of my brain knew that I didn’t want the complications or mess that would be attraction to another person regardless of gender.  
  
     Maybe that is why I loved math before I loved science.  
  
     Things were clearer especially at the beginning. Label things correctly, work in a logical step by step way and there is no problem you can’t solve. I never went far enough into theoretical math to be amazed by its intricacies. Instead I was wooed by the way that math in a fashion mapped out on the human body. There were givens and known reactions and much of the math processes were the pathways to deciphering a problem in someone’s body. The heart for me became the ultimate geometry proof. I could take the given information and plot it with the known reactions and test the soundness of my supposition. I could literally hack with my own two hands into a chest and solve the equation.  
  
     I wonder now if that unknown, unpredictable factor that I became attracted to in science has become what is undoing me personally?  
  
     I ended up in an isosceles triangle with Callie as she was at one end deciding on two equally interesting options: Mark and myself. She was point A and we were points B and C respectively. And really it didn’t matter which was called B and which was called C. Callie for her own part even said so, she was ‘testing a theory.’  
  
     After all this time, that makes sense to me.  
  
     Neva and Callie are equally attractive options to me. Each has pros and cons in my mind. I find it amazing and wonder now if I should have spent more time in psych rotation because Callie isn’t even here in my day-to-day life. It’s just the idea of Callie and suddenly I am in another unexpected triangle.  
  
     Although two points make a line and there are two points in common with both triangles: Callie and myself. And the distance between us is likely the same as it was regardless of our proximity. The tables have turned and it is I who am unsure of what is ahead of me, but the distance is the same between us. Uncertainty and doubt hold us as far apart as we were when we were scared together. I suppose the distance from me to Neva is the same as the distance that Callie was from Mark. Triangle A is similar to Triangle B.  
  
     Where does that proof get me though?  
  
     Can I buy eggs with it? Is there enough information to tell me the future? Can I make stock market decisions based on these divinations?  
  
     At the moment I don’t feel like much of a scientist or a mathematician. I feel more like the charlatan my dictionary landed on last week. I can’t seem to make sense of anything right now. I feel so ungrounded and uncertain. It is so unlike me. Even when I was in this sort of situation before with Callie at SGH I still never felt this hazy, unresolved or erratic. It’s like I’ve forgotten everything except how to be at the hospital. I cling more than ever to my mantra that tomorrow is another day.  
  
     Neva has sought me out a couple of times for lunch or coffee and I have done the same. I’m not sure if she is taking pity on me because she knows that I am not right, or if she is just drawn to me even though I’m a mess. I do not want her to pity me. That makes me feel even weaker than I have admitted to myself that I am. And I do not want her to cling to me because she wants to save the mess that I have become. Perhaps she is just trying to get along as I am, and she cares about me in general, and she wants to stay visible so that I do not forget her. I don’t know. And not knowing is driving me crazy. I have never been unable to come to a conclusion and to stand steadily by it. I walked away from SGH overnight in a blaze of glory because it was what needed to be done and I have never once second guessed that or questioned it. Now I can’t even figure out if I want to write a return email to a girl who helped me learn a lot and made me a mess. I also can’t figure out if I want to truly date the woman I was already kind of dating in the first place.  
  
     What the hell? Maybe, I’m just obtuse and not the triangle at all.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	43. Square

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Square**_  
  
 _ **June 18, 2009**_  
  
     I signed up for kickboxing on Saturday mornings. There’s a gym near work that offers classes. I’ve driven past it everyday and finally last night I stopped at the Vietnamese place next door to pick up some Chicken Pho and Spring Rolls. While I salivated over the idea of adding the basil and jalapenos with some sriracha hot sauce I went outside to walk around a bit. Of course I checked out the flyers for the various classes from the window outside. I saw that kickboxing was starting this Saturday and couldn’t resist. I need some kind of outlet for all of this up and down business in my life. Sometimes yoga just doesn’t give me that kick the crap out of the world feeling that I need. Maybe kickboxing can do that for me? And with both on my schedule I can’t get too out of whack with my inner peace right? I just need something new right now.  
  
     It’s funny I have a new job, new city, and new apartment, but I still needed something new. It’s not funny that I still have an obsession with Erica. At least it used to be this hoping for something obsession because I just didn’t know anything about her. Now though, now it’s like I know everything about her. I know that she’s here in LA and has been for some time. I figure that she must be settled in a little more than I am since I just got here. My email program is unequivocally telling me that she doesn’t want to hear from me or has nothing to say to me. So now my Erica obsession has changed into something more like an active I wish to rid myself of the subject that I’ve been so fixated on.  
  
     OMG. Now, I know why they say get the monkey off your back! Erica has been my drug of choice for eight months now. Well, genius, that explains a lot then.  
  
     No wonder, I’ve felt boxed in. Here we are in Los Angeles and it feels like a small town. I am trapped in a square with her.  
  
                                        

                                                                             Erica          Past  
  
                                                                             Present      Me  
  
     Of course, I want to take kickboxing and kick the crap out of life! I want to break out of this box. I want to bust free of Erica and the past and get moving on toward the future and whatever is ahead of me. Some part has held onto the hope that Erica was my future, but with her not writing back, even after I’ve found her. It’s like, I was on the trail to the treasure and finally got all the way into the cave, and then where there was a real live X marked on the spot—there was no treasure and a giant rock wall indicating the end of the line. I looked around and looked around and then finally saw the small print on the bottom of the wall: “Thank you for following the journey to its end. We hope that you learned a lot and will try a similar adventure in the future.”  
  
     I think I used to think that the whole box was the future with Erica and I in it and the past and the present as the building blocks toward that future. Now, I just think it’s a trap that I’ve built around myself and Erica isn’t even really there. She’s like this shadow boxer taunting me.  
  
      Aliens. Would you please just let it make sense for a little while? Let me see with some clarity, please?  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 

 


	44. Circle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Circle**_  
  
 _ **June 21, 2009**_  
  
 ~~Dear Callie,~~  
  
     I do not know what to say. My mind runs in circles.  ~~A circle in and of itself, my mind goes on repeat of various moments, times and thoughts. I seem to circle back to you over and over and so it is not so much my choice to write to you.~~  
  
     What have these months been to you?  
  
      ~~What happened when I knew you and what of it was real or important?~~  
  
      ~~What did we each do and say that we would take back or do again the same?~~  
  
      Are we in a circle that will never end or is it just that we started a cycle that we have left unfinished? And neither of us can move on while we are still stuck on this round-about?  
  
       ~~I was hurt by you. I believed in you, but you cut me in ways I don’t think I even understand. Have I healed only to be hurt by you again? Or have I merely healed over with a roiling infection underneath the scab? Will you help me or hinder me?~~  
  
      ~~Or am I tied to you by a bond made of purer stuff that neither of us were ready to see through to the end? Was I just as scared as you were? Was your weakness merely my chance to be the more certain one? Was I really certain then, because I’m so uncertain now? Was I just bluffing certainty with you to make me feel like I was the stronger one? Or because I thought that my certainty would be comforting to you?  
~~  
     What do you want from me at this point?  
  
     What could we possibly have now? After all this time?  
  
     Will I believe you if we apologize? Will I trust you?  
  
     ~~Does it matter since I’m trapped on the treadmill of you?~~  
  
      ~~Why are you always the hill I have to climb?~~  
  
      ~~Are you the fire that purifies and strengthens the bond or will I simply be burned?~~  
  
      ~~Are you in LA alone?~~    
  
      Why couldn’t you leave me alone?  ~~Why can’t I resist writing to you? I feel like we are two alcoholics at a table with numerous shot glasses in front of us and neither of us can finish the contest. I feel like we are both weary, tired, lonely, unable to move forward, but unable to break away either.~~  
  
***  
  
     Oh what the hell am I doing? I can’t even write this email to her. I should just cut my losses and make up with Neva. Maybe I can go back to counseling. I was on the road to recovery and creating something healthy with Neva. I was communicating more and Neva is none of the things that Callie was a disaster at. Neva doesn’t need to be ‘scared together’, because she is not scared. She doesn’t need to test any theories because she’s already done whatever it is that she needed to do.  
  
     UCLA Med is on the other side of town. Ortho and Cardio don’t interact all that much.  
  
     Los Angeles has 3.8 million people and covers 498 square miles.  
  
     I don’t have to ever see her. It’s just as if she emailed me from SGH. If I hadn’t clicked on her picture at UCLA, I could probably even convince myself that she was at SGH. For me, she was frozen in time that night I walked away. For all I know she was still standing out there in the cold all this time. I did click the picture though and I know that she is somewhere in this city and that she has changed. She looked different. You could see it in her eyes and her face. She, well, she’s grown. I hate that I can tell that. I hate that I’m even more curious than I was before. I guess I was always curious—how could I not be. It was in the back of my mind though where I didn’t have to acknowledge it or see it or DEAL with it. Now it’s out there in the open and I have to admit it to myself and deal with it.  
  
     It’s so real in fact that Neva and I are in this weird stasis.  
  
     We are still friendly but it is the kind of friendship that is waiting for some kind of signal or approval so that it can resume its activity as usual. Like we’re in a petrie dish waiting to see if the bacteria will grow or what.  
  
     Tomorrow will be another day, but part of me just wants to stay in one day; long enough that I can catch my breath, get some sleep, and figure it out before moving forward.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	45. Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Moon**_  
 __ ****  
June 22, 2009  
  
     Oh devil moon are you caused by smog? Or maybe just the devil? And why tonight? I was in surgeries all day, one after the other. It was one of those days where you check the clock over and over again thinking that surely time has gone by only it hasn’t and you want to kick yourself for checking the clock—again. I never thought I’d see the moon today because I never thought that it would end. I don’t know if I’m just tired from the extra activity of my class or PMS or what. Something has got to change though. I can’t drag and drag through the days like this.  
  
     Those giant suits for knee replacements need some refining. Surely after all these years we can refine the big bulky suits somehow? I don’t want to be streamlined like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible or anything but really—the giant HAZMAT suits have to go. There has to be a better way to protect the patient and the doctors. Maybe that will be my medical breakthrough? I can build legs out of medical scrap metal but apparently that isn’t enough. I have to invent the post-it of the medical world in order to really make a mark on the practice. Sigh. Maybe I can become filthy rich like my parents, this time all on my own. I think I’m finally at the point that I could handle that. I could buy an island somewhere far away and never think about Erica again. I could just do yoga and kickboxing in the open patio area of my chateau or some such with a really hot private instructor in tight gym clothes. I could visit civilization for extended periods of time whenever I wanted and even find love again at some point—on my own terms, timeline, and my own way.  
  
     The moon tonight is really pretty but I just feel like it’s taunting me. It’s really big and the sky is mostly clear for once. I want it to give me answers, but it’s just smiling at me. I finished my day that would never end and was wiped out. I grabbed some dinner in the café with Wiley. I intended to sleep in an on-call room even though I’m off tomorrow. After dinner I made the mistake of checking my email. Random notices, reminders about patients, questions from interns that are too eager to wait until tomorrow were the bulk of the mail. I was bored out of my mind clicking through them until I got to the tenth from the last one. I have no idea what the last nine emails were because I stopped at that one. Just in case it was a mistake I checked the names on the remaining ones and saw that this was the only one from her. I suddenly didn’t care about the rest.  
  
     Dr. Erica Hahn, Cardiothoracic Specialist, Cedars Sinai Medical Center.  
  
     It was short, but mine was too and it wasn’t like Erica ever babbled on.  
  
     Should we meet then?  
  
     From nothing to meeting—I guess it makes sense. Erica doesn’t like to waste time and if we are to be in contact it might as well be in person. She’s not going to have important conversations in emails. Also if we aren’t going to see each other then what’s the point of emailing. Maybe she’s still the Erica that I knew? How much can a person change in eight months?   
  
     Then again how much can a person change in front of your face?  
  
     Erica was as scared as I was at the beginning. She avoided me just as hard and as awkwardly as I avoided her. We kind of got into a groove of not avoiding and trying it all out. Then one morning BAM she woke up, ‘I’m a lesbian.’ I was shocked to say the least. I didn’t know what to do and my body was tingling and trembling with the fight of flight response. I mean I couldn’t slap her so I needed to get out the door right? I left thinking, ‘What was that?’ It was a weird jittery day that day too. I mean I get it now, but she just jumped right ahead of me like she had a warp speed motor or something.  
  
     Did I just say warp speed? I talk about aliens all the time. What is that? Have I been secretly watching the SyFy channel in my sleep again? When I was around Bailey or even Cristina I understood the sci-fi talk—when in Rome. I’m on my own now and I don’t actively seek out sci-fi so what is the deal? Are aliens really the best solution I could come up with for all of this? If I was going to go sci-fi, why didn’t I just imagine that a meteor had hit her and that it was over? No, I had to go and think that sentient beings had her and were watching me for personal growth. What the hell is that about? Maybe I need therapy?  
  
     I just flipped back through and I think there are aliens in every entry I’ve written for the last eight months. I can’t even blame LA or smog or that taunting moon out there. I was taking about aliens in Seattle. That’s it. I can, in fact, blame Seattle. More specifically I can blame SGH.  
  
     There. I feel better now.  
  
     I still won’t be able to sleep knowing that she wrote me and now I have to write her back, but I do feel better that I’m not crazy I just haven’t worked out all the ill effects of working at SGH. I’m still under the residual influences of the place. It’s not me. I’m not crazy. There. Good night.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	46. Star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Star**_  
  
 _ **June 25, 2009**_  
  
     The North Star will guide you. Follow the second star on the right until morning. There are so many stars to guide us and yet so many of us are still totally lost. We live blindly from day to day wondering what the best path is, who we should trust, where we should go next. Too often we lack the bigger picture. And what is the star guiding us toward? Is that even somewhere we want to go?  
  
     I do not want to head North, that is where all the troubles started.  
  
     As much as I would like for this all to be fixed with some fairy magic, I don’t want to fly away from my troubles to a land far away by following the second star.  
  
     Neva is losing patience with me. I can tell. I have hurt her and I can’t take that back. I can’t undo any of this. I know that I have to talk to Callie whether I really want to have her in my life again or not. This is still something I need to do. Closure I guess. Like going back in to cut out the infection and sew it back up. Maybe it will then truly heal and Callie can simply slip away into my past. Or maybe it can be a renewal and Callie can become a part of my life once more.  
  
     I hope that I am ultimately doing this in a better way than Callie did.  
  
     I hope that I will be able to keep Neva’s friendship regardless of how this turns out. Maybe she would not take me back after all of this with Callie. Perhaps though she and I could be friends. I think that had Callie decided against me in her little theory testing that I could have been her friend eventually.   
  
     Maybe that’s why it hurt so much!? Callie chose me and then didn’t choose me all the way. She chose to be with me, confessed her betrayals and begged to be with me, but when it came down to Izzie Stevens and the hospital—she chose them. She lured me in with her trust and then went against that. With Mark I didn’t see it and she came to me with remorse and guilt and the hope that we could move on. With the Denny/Izzie web of crazy she didn’t seem to have any remorse and to my face told me I was wrong.  
  
     And what will have changed now? This is where I need my star to guide me.  
  
      Was all of that in the heat of the moment? Were Callie and I too focused on smaller details to see the bigger picture involved? Clearly Callie had no understanding whatsoever of how what she was saying translated to her relationship with me. Perhaps there are things that looking back now and talking to her I clearly missed?  
  
     What a mess. Well tomorrow is another day to sift through it all.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	47. Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Heart**_  
  
 _ **June 26, 2009**_        
  
In four days, I think my heart will explode. I guess it’s good I’m going to meet with a world-class cardiothoracic specialist. The stress and anxiety of waiting for her to respond, giving up, and then having her respond has nothing on the turmoil I feel now waiting for the meeting we have set up. I guess we are both wary of the other. We each suggested public places and meeting there.       
  
We are not going to each other’s work, or a bar, or either of our houses.       
  
Cheesecake Factory in the Topanga Plaza.       
  
It’s not central to either of us, but it is easy to get to and easy for us to find each other. All very simple to set up really—a few short emails and it was done. Now, I guess the reality will settle in. What was I hoping for all of this time? What do I want to say? What do I want to hear?       
  
The hard part will be waiting four days until the actual meeting.       
  
I get it aliens—you have a sick and twisted sense of humor. Thanks a lot.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	48. Diamond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Diamond**_  
  
 _ **June 28, 2009**_        
  
How do you know which of life’s moments to reach out and hold onto? How do you know when to put down the camera and just be in the picture? Is it only at the end or almost the end when you see that slideshow of your life that you finally comprehend? If that is the case it is a wonder that more people aren’t throwing themselves in front of cars in order to figure out what is really at the bottom of their thoughts. How do you mentally sort out so many things in order to make various life decisions? Medical decisions for me are like mathematical puzzles. There may be more than one way to achieve the result and there may be many factors involved, but generally I’ve been through enough trials that I am able to find a solution for the patient. If they choose not to follow my example that is their decision, but I have always been able to work a way around what is presented to create a treatment plan.       
  
Yesterday a woman came into the ER after a car crash and while being treated she kept going on about her son’s school successes. This woman had rough hands from a hands-on life and she was tattooed with various symbols and perhaps names and dates. During surgery I was called in because she went into cardiac arrest. It was touch and go for a while but under careful observation we were able to put her in the cardiac ward for further care. I came by this morning on rounds and a teenager and a child were there with her. She woke up while I was checking her and introduced me. “This is my diamond, my Miguelito. And my oldest daughter Josephine.”       
She looked at him like he was an angel. I hope that he is able to stay untarnished as he grows up. She never once asked about her rings. The diamond was still shiny and the ring could be repaired, but she did not think twice about it. The intern that came to bring them to her received a cold look for interrupting her time with her son to bring such an unimportant message and prize.      What do we each hold dear?       
  
A diamond. A person. A job. A set of values.       
  
Callie held the status quo as her diamond, I think. Being with me changed the status quo. Being upset about Izzie Stevens after so much time had gone by would upset the status quo. In her defense of what was known to her, did she unwittingly let a diamond get away from her. I don’t mean to make myself so important, but she did leave SGH and she did contact me.       
  
I think that my diamond was my unshakable sense of Dr. Hahn’s righteousness when it came to bad social behavior, ignoring women in the workplace, and ultimately a black and white sense of right and wrong. I saw things in absolutes, where really there were none. People and the idea of absolutes don’t really go together. Oil and water and all that. I have changed because I have expanded my views. I was forced to… by Callie in all actuality.       
  
I walked away certain that I had held to the line of the righteous—only I was plagued by her. I had to figure out what the draw was, what my mind would not let go of. As I watched people come and go, and looked at myself, I found that the absolutes that I wanted to cling to weren’t there. Did that mean that things were handled the best way for everyone involved? Probably not. Did it mean that I made a poor decision when I left? No, not necessarily. I could have tidied up certain things, but I have learned that not everything has to be handled in the most precise way and it still gets done. Surprisingly it often gets done by others to a level that I would even find satisfactory if I let others do things.       
  
With Neva I have found that I am honestly attracted to her, although I may not be in love with her. I am capable of hurting someone just as I was hurt by Callie. I have had to let go of the idea that a bad decision means that the person is bad. I am not a bad person, although I have hurt Neva. Perhaps Callie wasn’t a bad person although she hurt me?       
  
I guess the question is what do I hold to be a diamond now? What does Callie hold to be a diamond? And are they compatible? And does that even matter? Is Callie just wanting to make amends and find closure? What do I want? Just closure? I keep thinking this over and over in my head and can’t seem to let it go. I’ve let it upset everything I had going with Neva. Part of me must want to see if there is still something between Callie and I.       
  
Sigh. All of this lead me to think about Miguelito and his mom. She knew what was important—and it wasn’t her diamond ring.      Callie and I are meeting in two days. I have never been so uncertain of what I want or think before meeting someone. In every other type of meeting—interview, appointment, or even a date—I have known what I wanted going in. I was after the job, or I had a question to be answered, or I was attracted and wanted to see how it would go. I will be walking into the restaurant not knowing what kind of meeting this is or what emotions to attach to it or prepare for. I have to assume Callie is slightly uncertain herself. My guess is that she has some idea of what she hopes will be the outcome, since she’s the one that found me and initiated contact.       
  
I certainly hope that I sleep tonight. I almost want to take an on-call shift tomorrow night, so that I can burrow into the safety of an on-call room. Then, I would also have an excuse for being tired or at a loss for words. No matter where Callie is coming from, she would understand that.       
  
Tomorrow is another day closer to this meeting and I can only wonder what fuse is in the powder keg I heading towards.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	49. Club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Club**_  
  
 _ **June 30, 2009**_        
  
I would have known Erica anywhere, but being 45 minutes early didn’t hurt either. I was so excited that I hugged her before I think she even realized that it was me. She stiffened and made a shocked sound until I pulled away telling her it was me. Sometimes I am such a bull in a china shop just charging into things. On the other hand how were we supposed to greet each other? Nervous and awkward.       
  
I think that I did us both a favor.       
  
We had something to laugh about while we got drinks in the bar. It was early and we were practically the only ones there. I was glad to have her all to myself so that I could really see her reactions instead of watch her watching other people around us.       
  
In my mind I had created this image of Erica Hahn the Ice Queen that was so strong and unflappable. Well, I also thought she had been kidnapped by aliens, but I take full credit for that little brain warp. And sometimes when I was really in the mood I imagined what it would be like to melt her and get her to give in to me. Like that second or third time in the on-call room when I finally got it right.       
  
Erica now was softer. I could feel that she was thinner and her eyes were more open as she looked at the world around her with a different view. She was quiet and used her words efficiently but it was a different silence. When I first hung out with her and Mark, she was quiet until she had come up with a one-liner to put Mark in his place. It was almost as if she was too good to hang out with us, but just needed some entertainment after that first day. I think that tequila and my hands on approach to people broke her out of her mold, or maybe it was the laughter. I don’t think Erica had ever really laughed that hard. Mark and I were pretty funny I have to admit.       
  
This time her silence was deferential to the world as if she had decided to let the world around her teach her a few lessons. It was nice that she was softer. I didn’t have to work so hard to feel like we could talk, but I also just wanted to hold her. She has been knocked down at least once in all of this. I liked Erica strong, even if I wanted her to be a little less harsh on everyone. I liked her fire and bite I guess is the word.       
  
She smelled good and I had the instant feeling like we had known each other this whole time. I think Erica felt the same. I scooted into the booth too close to her, but I wasn’t going to scoot away even when I realized my over step. She stayed near me putting her purse to the other side. Talking about the menu, she leaned into me to see what I was pointing at.       
  
We shared a shy glance at each other but then I pointed to the avocado egg rolls. She said that she had been on-call last night and we talked about the 17 year old that had come in with a drug over dose at 2 in the morning.       
  
We didn’t talk about being together or SGH or leaving.       
  
We did talk about being gay when all was said and done, learning lessons in the last year, and how wonderful it was to be in a new hospital.       
  
I wanted to hold her when she told me about losing her juvenile patient. She confided in me about Neva when I said I hoped she had someone to lean on. We smiled because we both knew she doesn’t make friends easily.       
  
She laughed when I bought her a shot of tequila and asked her about her Spanish lessons. It was awkward when she made a comment about teaching someone else. I told her about Arizona.       
  
Erica’s eyes on me gave me shivers when I told her that she would have liked Arizona. It was like she saw through me, but I was glad this time. I wasn’t afraid of what she might see, or what it might mean for me. She only asked why I thought that, but it seemed like she saw me in a new way after that. Like I was real or something.       
  
Dinner was over too soon and I could see how tired she was.       
  
We didn’t make plans, but I took her cell phone and programmed my number into it. I feel like I was on an interview or something. Like both of us were. We each have so many questions I’m sure. We used to date (kind of) so what did this meeting mean? We didn’t talk about why we went our separate ways. I didn’t apologize, but she didn’t explain why she left like that.       
  
Sigh. Arizona always told me that I needed knowledge. She said that I had a lot to learn and she could see it in my eyes. She gave me the 10 of Clubs from her deck before she left. “Clubs are all about knowledge, Callie. The ten card is the power card. Maybe it will give you the boost you need.” I shook my head at her, but she gave me that Arizona look down your head eyebrow raise look and I tucked it in my scrub coat pocket.       
  
Today, it was in my jean’s back pocket as I met with Erica and tonight it will be under my pillow. I certainly need all the help I can get and I certainly need all the knowledge I can get.       
  
God, I hope she calls.       
  
Um, aliens. I know I haven’t been very nice lately, but could you like get her to call? Maybe beam her aboard for a pep talk or show her my progress charts or something? Yeah. That’d be great.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 

 


	50. Spade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Spade**_  
  
 _ **June 30, 2009**_        
  
I walked in and was greeted by a kamikaze hug from Callie. She pulled away when I froze up and apologized saying she had been waiting for too long. I shook my head and slipped my purse back onto my shoulder. So Callie. And she let me know in that simple gesture that this was a friendly meeting of some kind and not the twelfth step or something like that. I wasn’t sure how I would feel if she was just reaching out to say what she had to say.       
  
Maybe she did me a favor because after the hug we were laughing and I realized that I wasn’t sure what I would have said any way. I think it would have been even more awkward if we like shook hands or something. The bar was practically empty which meant I couldn’t look away and distract myself. I had to keep my focus on her and let my emotions show more than I would have normally. She seemed nervous but confident. It looked good on her.       
  
I don’t know what I expected. I guess in my mind I knew that she had changed. Except that I had free-framed her in my mind from that last day and I came in expecting that she was that Callie. Luckily enough Callie’s every word and gesture showed me that she wasn’t that Callie. She was this new version of herself that glowed. I hoped that I too looked like I had changed for the better. Only time would tell I guess. Hopefully Callie will tell me in time.       
  
I nearly died when Callie offered to show me her kickboxing skills. The passing waitress received the rewards for her demonstration, and I found myself a little jealous at their sudden contact. Just as quickly Callie shrugged the girl off pointing to her full drink and she fixed her eyes on me asking if I needed anything. The bar service was non-existent after that, but Callie’s attention on me was worth the thirst that I developed looking into her beautiful brown eyes. She was so irresistible when I first met her and her sense of humor was what drew me to her in the first place. It would have been hard to keep all my Ice Queen walls up while I snorted tequila up my nose and clutched my sides from laughter-pains. I have to admit (grudgingly) that Mark did provide a nearly endless supply of material for our jokes.       
  
Callie looked good of course, but now you could see her confidence. She was not ‘calm,’ but comfortable in her own skin. She was a successful attending in a new hospital on her own. As a person she was confident in the choices she had made and places she had been in the last year. I think she has grown even more beautiful.       
  
They put us in a private booth toward the back and I blushed when Callie scooted all the way around and practically into my lap. I felt her tense up as she realized what she had done. We used to sit like that all the time. Only now we both knew it was different. I hoped that if I didn’t react that she would stay put. I breathed a little easier when I felt her relax against me. Our thighs and hips flush against each other as we tried not to brush elbows too much. I couldn’t find the appetizer she was telling me about so I leaned over to look at her menu. I must have stayed too long breathing her in and enjoying the closeness because I looked up and she was staring at me. We shared a shy smile and I sat up explaining that my eyes were tired from my shift.       
  
I felt good that we talked. I was surprised but happy that I told her about Neva and Chelsea. She seemed genuinely glad that I had someone. It was so caring and I missed that part of Callie.       
  
I wished I could be more specific when I talked about Neva. I’m usually very direct. In fact I used to get in trouble for being too direct on occasion. I was raised that you call a spade a spade and you move on. But with Neva I could only say that she was there for me and let the rest live in the implication. Callie accepted it just as that—a nebulous connection that couldn’t be entirely explained. I shouldn’t be so surprised. What were Callie and I to each other, when all was said and done, really?       
  
Callie’s journey couldn’t have been more different from mine, but we seem to have landed in the same place for a reason. I’m glad that after I left she didn’t hid herself, or from herself, and in some protective (not the jealous part) I am glad that she wasn’t alone. Dinner ended too soon and I didn’t know what to say. Again I couldn’t say this was a spade: I’d like to see you again, Could we date, What do you want, Can I see you again, or even should I have said something else? We stood in the parking lot near her car as people bustled into the entrance and hurried up to wait for their dinner. It felt like a job interview, but I wasn’t sure who the leader was. Callie contacted me, but I was the one that had walked away. My heart did a flippy floppy thing when Callie pulled my cell phone from my hand. Her fingers touching me was a deliberate caress, even if it was brief. It was so typical of Callie to program her phone number into my phone, but I was glad that she did.       
  
How soon can I call her? It’s late tonight already. Would tomorrow be too soon?       
  
Tomorrow is another day and I can look forward to finding out what place in my life Callie will hold. I better sleep now so that I can look forward to the next horizon.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 

 


	51. Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Water**_  
  
 _ **July 3, 2009**_       
  
Expectations. We all carry them around with various effects. If they turn out to be the truth, then it’s all good, right—no harm, no foul kind of thing. On the other hand if they turn out to be wrong… well, now, that’s a different problem altogether. You see it’s a problem just from the beginning of that idea.       
  
We sell ourselves short all the time.       
  
We don’t readily see the best or possible in those around us.       
  
We have these expectations that are like suction cupped goggles to our faces that color what and who we see. We conveniently wrap ourselves up in little packages and forget that we change. We forget that others change. Or we somehow know it, but still don’t give the other person credit.       
  
And that whole not seeing the forest for the trees.       
  
Ay dios mio! As my abeula would say. That is something that we do even more than underestimate ourselves and others. We just flat don’t see people or what they mean to us.       
  
I didn’t think that I could survive when Erica left. It was certainly not a pleasant experience, but other than having to grow an entirely new skin—I survived. Not only that but I moved to a space where I could thrive. I would not have expected that. I mean after George I really didn’t think I could love again, let alone become this other person or heal if they left. I did. I don’t think it’s great that Erica left or anything. Gosh I wish that she hadn’t had to have left and that we could have done all this growing together. But we weren’t at the same place and time. That wasn’t what was meant for us then. I am a better person for having gone through all of that. And I am more worthy of being in a relationship now.      The best part is that I think Erica is too.       
  
I think, like me, Erica underestimated what she was capable of. Now I think that she is surprising herself with how far she has also come. I don’t know if anything is possible for us, since it sounds like she’s in a relationship already. I wish I could be happy for her. I mean, I kind of am, but maybe the aliens could take her away now so I don’t have to be the good friend and be nice to her woman. I know! Maybe the woman is really an alien princess and she’s just been waiting for the right time to beam her up.       
  
**Sigh**       
  
I guess not.       
  
I mean, I don’t want to lose Erica. I want to know her the way I never got to, even if that means I have to be her friend. It’s not like I really got to know her as a girlfriend much anyway. There was too much underestimating and forest in the way of trees or leaves and flowers or something like that.       
  
I guess, it’s all kind of like how everyone disregards water, until the pipe out in the street breaks, or the water heater goes out, or the sink upstairs in the building causes a nastiness overflow in your kitchen. We take water for granted because it’s always there, until its not. And we forget the value of it until we’re out.       
  
Taking a shower at the complex pool house where the light doesn’t work and you feel a wet spider web on your naked ass cheek… Never mind that the clean up in the kitchen is rank and you’re sure that you won’t get your cleaning deposit back. Or you know never mind that water calms nerves, cures homesickness, soothes a tummy, eases a headache, and you know like dilutes poison in the blood system or something like that. Ha ha. I crack myself up, but seriously people forget to drink and then have various symptoms and come to the doctor. Duh. Take a drink people. 3 litres per day. You’d be amazed.       
  
Well, that and not taking people for granted, or selling yourself short.       
  
If people all over the world could do those things this would be a different world. We talked on the phone this afternoon so we could get together on the weekend. Is it too soon to call her?  
  
—Callie

 

 

 

 


	52. Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Fire**_  
  
 _ **July 3, 2009**_        
  
When a house burns down the inhabitants scatter—children escape with neighbors or the police, parents arrive home to the carnage and wonder when the world turned upside down and pets make the best with whatever they can scamper towards.       
  
The press and firefighters hold a vigil over the wreckage until like a ship lost at sea the whole thing goes down.       
  
Eventually the world moves on. Temporary homes are traded for permanent ones, but what happens to the ties made while in limbo? Shelter, care, and even love fill those spaces of waiting and they cannot simply be tossed aside without thought in order to return to a life that may be better or worse than the one that burned down. Sometimes the fire purifies and the new path should become the normal path. Other times the path that was obscured can be found again if you wander through the wilderness for a little while. You come to a fork in the road, which path is the right one to take? Can a wrong turn eventually lead to the right road?       
  
Does every step serve a purpose in our life no matter how painful, or how boring, or how adventurous?       
  
The house that Callie and I had found ourselves in had fissures and probably termites. It had been condemned because of an earthquake. Yet it was new and we were just aware of each other and we wanted it to work. We boarded up broken windows and closed our eyes against the termites. To keep warm from the drafts we huddled together for warmth. It caught fire, whether it was from the inside out because of something within us, or from the outside in because circumstances ganged up on us—perhaps we’ll never know. It did burn though—to the ground. Into the night we fled each to our own place of safety, but not to each other. We did not know how to trust in what we had found—foolishly thinking our bond was just as flawed and doomed as the house we discovered it in.       
  
I sought sanctuary in Los Angeles and I found refuge in Neva. Do I continue on the alternate path because it will lead me to my life’s happiness in the end or do I leave this place and return to the original path with Callie?       
  
It’s just that you have these pictures in your mind of that other life. You don’t mean to, but you can’t shake them either. I feel like I have to know. I have to know what Callie is about and if there is a chance to connect with her, then I feel drawn. Moth to the flame. Oh bother. Everything is about the burn today.       
  
Neva said that she was going to take some time, family on the East Coast or something. I think she’s giving me a floaty arm thing for the pool so that she can slip away while I splash around. Not yanking away the support but at the same time preserving herself for the inevitable end. **Sigh** That’s what makes Neva so wonderful. Is it supposed to hurt this much to love two people?       
  
Guess that’s a stupid question. You aren’t really supposed to love two people in these puritanical states of America. I guess that’s the fire talking again, eh? Fire and brimstone. I’m lesbian and in love with two women, no wonder I can feel the fire at my heels.       
  
Well tomorrow is another day and I can only hope that all these thoughts of fire aren’t trying to signal something out there in the universe. Please just be a metaphor, mind.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	53. Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Earth**_  
  
 _ **July 5, 2009**_        
  
In grade school there were many tests of coolness. They usually focused on physical prowess in various activities. My strength and fearlessness probably served me best then and now, and often singled me out as the odd girl through middle and high school. Funny how things come around.       
  
We used to jump over bushes, walk over the top of the arch of the monkey bars, race to the far fence and back, and jump stairs. If you showed fear or couldn’t best everyone else then you lost status.       
  
I remember looking down a set of stairs knowing that I was going to get hurt with the same certainty that I knew I was going to jump anyway. I learned the unfortunate lesson that day that if you get hurt bad enough then the challenge is over with no cool status gained. Unless people thought your cast was wicked.       
  
Maybe it was because it was too early o’clock this morning, but I had that feeling as soon as I saw Erica.       
  
It’s like when you know that last slice of pizza is going to make you sick and you shouldn’t have another bite, but then you do and it was so good but now your tummy is way too full.       
  
“You know, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.” I remember rolling my eyes as a child. Who ever thought that up? I always wanted to say, “Yup, and there’s definitely too much of a bad thing too.” But I thought I might get a swat for sass or grounded for a week. Somehow with that kind of thing I always seemed to know where to stop just short of trouble, but in everything else in my life I didn’t even see the line until I had smacked my head hard against a consequence and was being told in no uncertain terms that I had crossed one. I still usually didn’t know where that line was; I just vowed not to do the same thing again if at all possible; or you know, at least not to get caught out doing it.       
  
Erica was sad. Her lady friend is leaving. She knew that she had to tell me because it would just be awkward. We talked about how weird it was to know each other so well after all this time and to not know each other’s lives at the same time. She didn’t want to talk about it and I was glad.       
  
She still smells like Samsara and mountain fresh tide. We were subdued but physically close—like our bodies were having that kind of friendly comforting conversation that our words weren’t ready for. It was the strangest thing and the nicest thing all at once. The gravel crunched under our feet and when we first started it was cool, but that only lasted a few minutes between the brisk pace and the whole sun coming up thing. I’m glad that Erica came with me to the sunrise classes a few times so that I already knew what she was like. I would have thought it a little odd to not talk that much had I not seen her in the morning before. In fact it would have been creepy, but I knew it just takes a while to get her warmed up. Then you have to watch out because she’s like a machine gun.       
  
I don’t want to work with Erica again, but I wonder what she’s like at work now. She talks about the PICU, which is so different from working in Seattle Grace and so often in the ER. I’m sure she wonders about my work too, although I am still in ortho, just now I’m an attending at a better hospital.       
  
Is it wrong that I was a little happy that her friend is leaving? Okay. A lot happy.       
  
Aliens, I’m glad that you brought Erica back to Earth and all. But you know, you weren’t supposed to put her back broken. You could examine her, take her on wild field trips around the bars of Saturn’s rings and all that, but you couldn’t bring her back broken. She’s too quiet. I mean, she’s always quiet, but I want the normal quiet back. The quiet that laughed at my jokes, scolded me for eating pop tarts, and beat me at darts. The quiet that reached for my hand when we were in that moment between surprise and denial and freaking out and breaking up. It may have only been once, but it was sweet and wonderful. It was not dirty or tainted with anything else. I’d like that feeling back to go with my newfound strength and hopefully Erica’s too. Otherwise, why did you even bring her back to Earth? Just to torture me with what I can’t have.       
  
God. She was beautiful. Her hair has gotten longer and her clip snapped. It blew in the wind and she kept fighting with it saying that she looked a right mess. I made her let me take a picture, so she could see herself. She didn’t see what I saw, but she smiled that I thought she was pretty.       
  
I’ll take what I can get, but I’m not giving up, aliens. Not until I have all of Erica.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	54. Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Air**_  
  
 _ **July 6, 2009**_        
  
I think Callie had on matching socks yesterday.       
  
Why that stands out to me the most I’m not sure. I guess, because I know what it takes to make her bother to match socks let alone at that time of the morning. I wouldn’t have suggested that early, except that she used to drag me to that Yoga class and it was going to be record highs. As it was I drank five glasses of water at lunch after our hike. Another thing I noticed was that she was gentle with me today. Quite the contrast from the hyper active tackle hug I got before dinner and drinks last week. I knew she sensed something. Like they say dogs can feel vibrations in the air before an earthquake or something. Or maybe that horses can smell fear. Something like that. It’s odd how Callie and I were always able to know that something was up with each other, even if we didn’t know what that was.       
  
She did say I was beautiful. I guess we are not going to be shy with each other. Cautious and holding back, but not shy. Really, there’s no reason to be.    
  
I don’t know how I could have been anything close to pretty with the wind and tangled hair. I was so hot by the end of the hike that I told her I wanted to cut it all off. She poured water on my foot and said she’d kill me if I did that.       
  
For a moment, we were both stunned. I don’t think Callie meant to be so forceful. We had been so peaceful and careful all morning. Maybe the heat had gotten to her too. The webbing of my shoe let the water right in and that foot was squishy all through lunch and then grocery shopping on my way home. I should have squirted her with my water bottle, but that would have meant giving up water for myself. She looked at me with those big Callie wide eyes, until I started laughing. Then, she lost it and bent herself over double.       
  
There’s something in the air between us. I guess there always was, always will be.       
  
I miss Neva though. Today at work, I almost went looking for her at lunchtime. Then I remembered that she had handed over her patients last week, before she told me she was leaving. I guess, it’s better that way—rip the band-aid off and all that. If she comes back there will be still be issues to deal with, but I guess she figures that I’ll have figured out what’s what with Callie. She probably doesn’t want to be around for all of that. Can’t say I blame her. Uncertainty. Choices. Emotions. No matter what--someone will get hurt, I suppose. That was true at SGH. No matter what--someone was getting hurt and it would have stayed that way if I had stayed. For all the turmoil right now, it’s part of readjusting and not a larger pattern like at SGH.       
  
Tomorrow is another day to place the cards in all the right places and see what is able to withstand the rush of the air, or the tremors of the earth and to remain a solid foundation for the future.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	55. Spirit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Spirit**_  
  
 _ **July 13, 2009**_  
  
     My first day as a resident was not much different than my last day as an intern. The problem with beginning and ending at the same institution is that each level of training blurs into the next. I didn’t feel any real sense of accomplishment, until I came to a new hospital. I was able to prove myself worthy of the job title in a way that I never could have at SGH. I mean I was moved up to attending before I left, but I didn’t really feel that I was anything new or different, until I was in a new environment. I suppose that’s why they say that change is good.   
  
     In the spirit of this thought, I found myself giving rather unusual advice today.  
  
     Matheo was babbling on and on about his girlfriend wanting to go to law school in San Diego, but he had always been here at UCLA. He didn’t want to leave what he knew and thought it was best for him to stay here where he was known. I tried not to say anything, when he rolled his eyes and said that his girlfriend had already checked for openings at Scripps.  
  
     Honestly. I tried not to say anything. I don’t know that I’m the one to give advice about much of anything.  
  
     My eyebrow and lip had something to say. In fact all 43 muscles in my face had something to say.  
  
     Luckily, I was able to turn it into a ramble about myself that he could take or leave. If he is as dense as I am afraid he is, then he could just appreciate it as a story about myself. If he has the brains that he should have, in order to get through med school and survive interning and years as a resident, then he should be able to see it for the parable of action that it was meant to be.  
  
     I found myself telling him how wonderful Seattle was and that I had formed a kind of family there. Then, I told him how hard it was to prove myself since the chief saw me as the young intern I started as. I added in the difficulty of making youthful mistakes and having to grow, while staying in the same place. I told him it would be like going back to his high school and trying to be taken seriously as the doctor that he is now. He didn’t say much as we worked through our knee replacement. I added that leaving, as hard as it was, had become the best thing I had ever done. Starting over had been hard, but it had been what my career and focus needed so that I could move forward.  
  
     Walking out of the ER my thoughts turned to Erica. I wondered what she would have told Matheo. I smiled knowing that I was certain I knew her answer—that I knew a part of her. Certainty is nice after so many months of uncertainty. I suppose that the aliens could still be lurking out there. I’ve kind of grown accustomed to them after all these months. Maybe they are out there manipulating our planet like a giant marble game. At least if that’s true, then I know that with my towel and the answer to life and everything I’ll stay on their good side. Erica will be safe on my say so and that thought makes me smile even more.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	56. Breakfast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

**_Fanfic 100—Breakfast_**  
  
 **July 14, 2009**  
  
The chief wants my five year plan. Thank god, I was able to control the laughter that nearly erupted from my diaphragm and pretend to choke on my soda. It caused a bit of a scene, but I’d rather someone give me the fake Heimlich than admit to just how uncertain I was about the ground under my feet, let alone the next five years. I’d blame California and its never ending tectonic plates shifting, but I know that no matter where I was at this point there would be the feeling of unease.  
  
In the past, I made a plan and carried it out with the efficiency of a robot.  
  
Only now, I have found that I am made of softer stuff than a robot.  
  
It is no longer a lock step process to go through life—in high school deciding to go to college and in college deciding to go to medical school and in medical school choosing where to intern. I suppose if I could still pretend that I was satisfied with an immaculate, but empty apartment, and free weekends to read and re-read medical journals, then I could still live that kind of life. I could be looking to where to take Cedars Sinai in the next five, ten, even fifteen years—all the while keeping an eye out for the next move up for myself. The fact is that I’m not satisfied with that kind of life any longer. Callie woke the rest of me—the human soft side that craves affection, fuzzy socks, and playful fighting. Neva showed me that it could be sustained over time and didn’t have to be a bright fireball in my existence obliterating everything. Now I must figure out who and how to live the happiest without damaging either one any more than I have to.   
  
I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of hope, but at the same time I am filled with the sense of uncertainty. I do not know where I will be a year from now or five years from now. I thought I would have been at Seattle Grace far longer than I was and I cannot imagine that it was only eight months ago. It feels so much longer ago than that.  
  
Sigh. A plan is not carved in stone, right? That’s why they develop Plan A and Plan B and have contingencies for a wide variety of issues that could disrupt a plan. The point it to lay a foundation and point in a direction and then to set out. Then as the plan unfolds and new data comes in—you re-evaluate and adjust the plan.  
  
You may not know what the day has in store for you, but you start with a good night’s sleep and a decent breakfast. With those two things in your favor you set out to make the most of the daylight hours.  
  
Callie and I started out the hike in the early morning and made the best of the day. But it wasn’t the day that either of us had planned.  
  
Sigh. I may not be any farther in what to tell the chief, but at least I feel like I can rest tonight with the smell of Callie’s Tresor and her smile to encourage me.  
  
Tomorrow is another day and there is always a plan to create. I guess I am finally in the director’s chair and creating that plan on my own. What a wonderful mixture of unbridled possibility and hope, dashed with a healthy dose of uncertainty and fear. I guess it figures that Callie is around; she has been the biggest catalyst of change in my life up to this point. It is only fitting after all.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	57. Lunch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Lunch**_  
  
 _ **July 17, 2009**_  
  
     What a fricking day. It wasn’t so bad so much as never ending. Is it just fatigue? I wish I knew. I was feeling pretty good lately, but maybe I’m just tired of being on the spot all the time. A new job is nice but the shiny-ness has to wear off some time, right? I need to relax a little. I know it was too relaxed at SGH, but I am not so put together all the time. Besides that I’m constantly checking my phone for messages or email. It’s good but I’m sure that the energy is flowing right out of me. Although I do get a nice boost whenever I get something from Erica.  
  
     On days like today though I think that self-improvement is over rated.  
  
     I can’t believe that I fell for all that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ crap.  
  
     Yeah yeah. I’m in a better place. My chi is aligned with yoga and my aggression is released with the kick boxing. This hospital and job are better.  
  
     But I still live like basement girl. You’d think I’d still be warming up spaghetti-os on my carbeurator before I eat in the garage right from the can.  
  
     Aubergine. Courgette. Gherkin.  
  
     A zester? What the hell is that?  
  
     My mother taught me to Moros y Cristianos, sofrito, vianda, Ropa vieja, Boliche, and tamales…  
  
     I don’t need to do anything else, do I? Why do I constantly try to try new things? It always messes me up.  
  
     Aubergine is just a fricking eggplant. They are purple. Food should not be purple. It’s not Halloween. I mean seriously, who eats Aubergine? I know people that order eggplant parmesan, but they have the good sense to order it in a restaurant and smother it to death under parmesan cheese. They don’t bring one home and try to cook it and eat if for four days. I took it for lunch today and just threw it away. I couldn’t do another day of it. I was really glad that Mark wasn’t there to make fun of me or egg Erica on with her condescending eyebrow raise and snickering. I was sad that Alex wasn’t there to wolf down any homemade food he could get a hold of.  
  
     I have learned and I guess that was the point. If by the age of 35 I haven’t heard of it, then I haven’t been missing much and don’t need to better myself by learning how to use it. It’s okay to just say no. Wasn’t that what my generation was taught anyway—the legacy of Nancy Reagan. Seriously and I thought that the aliens were just after Erica. They seriously have a whole other master plan going on that we are in the dark about.  
  
     Sometimes though, a courgette is just a zucchini and a gherkin is just a dirty sounding word for pickle.  
  
     At least I do have a nice place full of rock n roll and me. I have a phone that Erica calls and socks that match (sometimes) and I have more in my fridge than I used to. I guess despite my urges to self-improve I have actually gotten better. I just don’t know if any of the actual trying to get better things have done the work. I’m secretly thinking that between time and the aliens, maybe I’ve just grown up a little bit.   
  
     There’s still no way in hell that I need a zester. Once I found out what it was I had a flash of my mom ‘zesting’ an orange when I was a kid. She didn’t have no stinkin’ zester. And her food was always just fine.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	58. Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Dinner**_  
  
 _ **July 17, 2009**_  
  
I have no idea why, but growing up I became possessed with the idea that a big dark wood oak table was one of the signs of a truly successful person. One of those visual markers that when you walked into their house, you could tell they had made it, in whatever their field of choice. I guess I got the idea from Hollywood somehow, like so many things that television has shaped over time. Seeing a big car, fancy shoes, a leather or fur coat… things that I may not have ever wanted, but somehow had ingrained in my mind that they were signs of prosperity. It wasn’t until I was much, much older that I realized those so-called signs of success didn’t reflect any kind of personal peace, happiness, or fulfillment.  
  
Sitting down with my dinner alone at the big table, I looked at my place. It seems awfully empty without Neva or Callie. The day had been fraught with loss. It seemed that I was not alone in my feelings of isolation. Sitting in the attendings’ lounge I was drawn into a conversation with a hematologist treating a boy with leukemia. The family was at their wits end trying to juggle all of their responsibilities and they had asked his advice. Breaking from strictly doctor to patient into the role of general family advisor was not easy. I know that my observations, since losing Chelsea had changed considerably. I tried to share with him some of my experiences, but found the words didn’t seem to fit. I wished that Neva had been around. Her area of expertise was helping families. The details of life in the hospital and what drew families closer or tore them apart was amazing. She had been able to help me bridge the gap between my charts, x-rays, and various medical evidence into the faces of the patient as person and loved one.  
  
In the end, I told him to seek out one of the other social workers that I knew worked with Neva. I simply said that a few conversations and watching the social worker interact with the counselor and the family would help him to understand that bigger picture. He thanked me and sighed as he went to answer another page. Eventually, I went to make my rounds checking on my caseload.  
  
As I sat at the table pondering Callie’s smile and Neva’s comforting hand on my arm, I felt lost.  
  
I moved into the living room and put on the television. I lost myself in the familiar images on the screen, but I wasn’t really watching them. I was thinking about cuddling on the couch. Funnily enough, I couldn’t seem to decide if I was cuddling with Neva or Callie. I left my dinner dishes on the table and just curled with the pillow for a bit, letting the sounds of the tv and my strange day dreams wash over me. I suppose, I went to sleep for a bit. Then I wandered in here, but couldn’t sleep. Strange. I feel like this mood was what I had to do today or something.   
  
Is it a sign of change in my life?  
  
I don’t know. And I’m getting used to that, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it very much. I do know that tomorrow is another day and I can start it right and go from there.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	59. Food

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Food**_  
  
 _ **July 19, 2009**_  
  
Leaving work today, I felt good. I went to my kick boxing class and rocked it. Right up until I threw a really hard kick at the guard. Sigh. I felt it. My right leg shifted just slightly as my partner encouraged me. My left leg rose up, kicked out and simultaneously my foot hit the pad and my right leg gave out. I was on the ground before I could even flail. Then, I was rolling around on the floor trying not to suffocate on my spit and moaning past my mouth guard. Maybe that was for the best. As one of the only women in the class, I really didn’t want to look like a pansy, but pulling the upper thigh muscle that wraps around the inside… woof that hurts something awful.  
  
Esmeralda would have laughed at me, but she probably would have done some Mr. Miyagi clap your hands and rub them until they are hot and then lay the healing touch on me. She’s a kick ass chick, no doubt, but I would have hated being that weak in front of her.  
  
At length, Jeffrey helped me to the side and left me to my own devices. It was just as well.  
  
Erica called as I was getting my things and contemplating how painful it would be to drive myself home. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done worse before. It was just that I was tired of being alone. When I was young, I hiked on a sprained ankle for days on a backpacking trip, because there was no way that I wanted to miss that trip. I had absolutely fallen in love with the idea of living in the wilderness and carrying all that I needed with me. I could not imagine being left behind by the group of girls in my summer group. I would have had to hang out with the younger kids while they went out and saw things that no one gets to see, unless they take the time to go on foot. Tonight though, I was hit with the fact that I was going to push past the pain in order to go home alone to an empty apartment. It was a kick ass apartment. I was a kick ass doctor. I had a life that I loved, but knowing I wanted and would eventually have someone to come home to or for—well, that was starting to gnaw at me. I was ready and yet this pain in my leg and knowing I was going through it alone… It just made me that much more impatient for that future I could tell was on the horizon. Change was coming, I could feel it, but standing there in the foyer of the studio while everyone else continued the class, I was impatient. I was also in pain.  
  
Erica’s voice in my ear was like a beacon of hope placed at just the right interval to remind me that the future was on its way. The horizon was drawing nearer and it was a matter of time.  
  
Instead of leaving, I sat on the bench in the front and let my bag fall to the ground. I ran my fingers through my hair and laughed at her story. A kid had pulled the fire alarm, not once, but twice, and it had taken all of her will power not to throttle the parents. The frustration in her voice oddly soothed me as I lay back against the bench. Her voice was low and grumbly and I could imagine how dark her blue eyes were. I hoped that she had a good glass of red wine. I knew that I had some at home I could offer her. I knew that she would come and get me, if I asked her to. It seemed like we were in a tug of war where we realized that we both won if we just pulled ourselves closer together, instead of worrying about the rope.  
  
It wasn’t a long conversation, but it was just right.  
  
I stood and shouldered my bag, like I had as a kid on that hike. In pain, I made my way out to the car and headed home full of hope. Back then, I was part of a group and I carried all the food I would need. Tonight, I felt on the edge of belonging to someone, and in my bag of hope, I carried Erica—all the food I would need.  
  
I sure hope that this leg is better than it feels tonight. I don’t want to be weak in front of Erica. She’d be even worse than Esmeralda. I wouldn’t doubt, if she knew karate and had a black belt hidden somewhere with a purple heart… Maybe she earned it saving the country from the invading aliens… Or maybe she knows alien jiu-jitsu and earned the purple-heart after time traveling back to WWII where she saved Kennedy on that PT-109… Sigh. I just hope that someday I get to unravel all of her mysteries from the inside out. I really hope that I don’t have to be her friend learning things on the outside of the glass. I hope that the change I feel on the horizon is the eventual reality of us finally having a chance together. It’s so vivid to me. I would have come home tonight and poured her some wine, then she would have told me about her growly grumbling day while she massaged my thigh… and then well, I get distracted in that day dream as I imagine us getting distracted as well.  
  
Sigh. Aliens. If you aren’t going to let me have her, then can you take me away? I could learn jiu-jitsu, if I needed to. I swear—no more pulled muscles. Honest.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	60. Drink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Drink**_  
  
 _ **July 21, 2009**_  
  
The phone. I hate the phone. I work with my hands. I may not be a mechanic working on a car, or a construction worker building a house, but I cut and sew and fix bodies with my hands. My bedside manner is a little rough and I can only imagine if I had to function based on just my voice and not the medical charts and my face and hand gestures. True, I have gotten better since Callie, my own observations, and Neva, but still I don’t like the phone. I don’t call in prescriptions, surgeries, or results. Interns, residents, nurses, and appointment calling services do all of those things for me. I show up and go to work—write my name on the OR board and answer pages.  
  
I’ll call my family when I have to, and in recent times, Neva, and now Callie. Tonight, I don’t want to talk to any of them.  
  
Mother is still upset that I moved to Los Angeles—too many bad characters. I have to tell her over and over that Hollywood is just that and I don’t live on a movie set. Los Angeles is a large interwoven metropolitan area and not everything is drugs, prostitution and crime. I sometimes wonder what she would do if I told her that I worked for the local mafia and tended to the hearts of hookers. More than once the lines have started to form on my tongue while I waited for her to come to a rambling stop on the phone. This afternoon I very nearly said something, but then I was paged loud enough on the speaker system that she heard it and let me go.  
  
Neva called to check in. It’s been two weeks. She sounded distracted. I don’t know where she’s gone or what she’s doing really. I don’t know if I really get to ask her too many questions anymore. Have I lost the right? Holding back seemed louder than our words and it hurt. She wants to know how I am, but I can tell she doesn’t want to ask. I have to figure out what is going on with Callie enough that I can truly talk to her. So far I don’t have much to report. I hung up thinking how much I hate the phone and how wrong it was that I had talked to everyone I might talk to in a week and still felt like I needed a drink.  
  
I randomly called Callie the other day. I think she hurt herself at karate or whatever it is she’s doing now. It was good to hear her voice after chasing that child around all afternoon trying to avoid an unnecessary fire drill. It’s not like it’s easy to evacuate a hospital. I couldn’t believe that his parents didn’t have him on a leash. I wanted to put him in the PICU, or at least give him a tour so he could maybe see that while his life sucked—there were other problems out there worse than his. I hoped that his father would decide to have the surgery at City of Hope, just so that his family’s issues weren’t mine ever again. My compassion is a new trait and I don’t want to wear it out. Callie seemed amused by my aggravation, which strangely amused me.   
  
While I was amused, I hung up still confused. I am in some kind of catch 22 and I don’t know how I got there, which is aggravating because that means I don’t really know how to get out. I just have to start each tomorrow with fresh hope that I will find some much needed clarity. Yes. That’s all I can do—tomorrow is another day.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	61. Winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Winter**_  
 __ ****  
July 23, 2009  
  
Erica wanted to go for a walk this morning, but I told her that with my leg I wasn’t up to much. She chuckled about my leg and how I had a very awkward week in orthopedics. I groaned and told her to come over if she could play nice, or I’d see her later. I really hoped that she’d choose to play nice and can’t believe how nice it was. I met her outside with my sweatshirt, one for her, and two coffees. She glared at me in her exercise wear, but one glare from me and she made a motion as if she pretended to zip her mouth shut. It was so cute. Falling for her this time around is so much nicer because I know. I know she’s wonderful, and what I want, and that she's worth every ounce of frustration that might be coming my way. I know that she’s not perfect and has been through a lot just like me, but also still so different from me. It's like I get to look at her as if I have never seen her before, but I don’t have to be shy or too awkward.   
  
After walking a few minutes she finally gave up.  Without speaking she just reached for the sweatshirt I had draped over my arm and handed me her coffee.  I laughed and she slammed the sweatshirt over her head in a huff.  She couldn’t believe how cold it was this close to the beach and I just smiled at her. It’s water. Of course, it’s colder. She lived in Seattle for how long? Then again the California stereotype is of a hot summer. No one ever really talks about June Gloom or heat waves in the winter.   
  
At the end of our beach walk, the sun had burned through the marine layer. I made a quick lunch and we sat on the back patio watching the waves crash. Coffee was replaced by a glass of wine and the morning stretched into afternoon. I wondered how long I could keep Erica with me. I wondered if I could get her inside to my couch. I wondered… so many things and she caught me a couple of times. Her look was questioning and she was so cute when she bit her lower lip against the edge of her perfect white teeth.  She wanted a thorough explanation of my week once I mentioned how I had to make a resident put a cast on a little girl since I couldn't get that low.  Then she wanted to know if she could come to kickboxing class with me sometime.  I stared at her and then she added that I might need a doctor on site and since she was entertained she'd volunteer.  
  
After she left, I wondered about the cold morning and how it would be in the future.  I found myself wondering what the winter would bring. July is ending. The fall is a time to find yourself and settle in. Winter is a time for slumbers and cocoa. I wondered if Erica would tend to the fire in my heart. I wondered if she had a twin flame burning in hers—for Neva who has left, and for me who had been lost. Or maybe she burned for another.  
  
I sat curled in the chair my leg groaning in mild discomfort and I held the sweatshirt that smelled like Erica’s precious Samsara and my dryer sheets. Aliens, do you have winter in space? No. I didn’t think so.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	62. Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Spring**_  
  
 _ **July 26, 2009**_  
  
Spending time with Callie is rapidly becoming my favorite thing. With Callie there’s no need to be guarded. We’ve already done most of the personally embarrassing conversations and seen each other naked. I guess you can’t really undo that no matter what your relationship goes on to become. It’s like that knowledge acts as a spring forward through all the crap—even if time has gone by and you once again are almost strangers. I think the hard part between us is that we have lived apart and experienced a lot of deeply personal changes and observations that can’t just be spring loaded like basic intimacy. I mean I know that if I need to scoot close to Callie I can do that, whereas with Neva it was more difficult to do until we had spent time together.   
  
How do I talk to Callie about getting to know my patient’s better or their families? Where do I begin to explain how it felt to experience the loss of Chelsea through sharing time with her friends and family? How would Callie have reacted to the funeral? How has her work change? What brought her to Los Angeles? Did something even worse happen at Seattle Grace? Her life was so wrapped up in the hospital and people there that it’s hard for me to imagine her leaving. I don’t know if they did something horrible there, that I would even want to know. I can barely stand knowing the hint of things that I do. Los Angeles was barely far enough away from that place.  
  
Has she explored her feelings with anyone else? With another woman? Do I really even want to know? What has she gone through and how did she end up here? How did she come to terms with coming out, when I know that was incredibly difficult for her?  
  
If I met Callie for the first time I would want to get to know her. She’s beautiful. I would want to know about her emotional journeys and professional milestones. I wouldn’t be hurt to know that she had to do those things without me, because there would have been no me previously in her life. Then again, I was the catalyst for her changes, just as she was the catalyst for mine. If we met now for the first time, would we only be delayed in finding these important facets of our personalities? Or would the importance of who we are to each other be diminished because we had started the journey separately?  
  
Strange questions that plague me, since none of them have answers that I’ll have any way to know.  
  
I left Callie’s house the other day unsettled. I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to stay at Callie’s house. I was filled with the desire to take care of her and overwhelmed with how right it felt to be in her presence. Were we really meant to share a space, to be in each other’s lives intimately?  
  
Am I just used to that with Neva, and now she has left either temporarily or permanently?  
  
I hope I get to see Callie this week. I guess the more I see her, the more certain of our connection I can be. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, but maybe later in the week. Or the weekend for sure. Till tomorrow then.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	63. Summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Summer**_  
  
 _ **July 27, 2009**_  
  
Why does time bend and warp the way it does? I think the aliens enjoy playing crack the whip with our emotions and memories. Days like today I wouldn’t be surprised to find out we live in the Matrix or some giant human sized lab rat Earth shaped maze that the aliens have total control over. It would really explain why summers off as a kid always seemed longer—the aliens use that summertime to elongate reality and perform experiments. On the adults they test their endurance and stress levels with the longer days and elevated heat levels. In kids they want to understand certain phenomena that human children can get into with too much time on their hands and not enough supervision. Dynamics of social structures are tested as kids break normal school ties and form new ones in their neighborhoods and away at camps.  
  
Sigh. I know it’s silly, but summer has always been magical. Sometimes the kind of magic that sneaks up on you and you don’t realize it at the time, but you remember it clearly later—‘I was happy then.’  
  
Last summer I really got to know Erica. I can’t believe it was a year ago that we were going dancing, throwing darts at Joe’s and hitting sunrise yoga. If the aliens aren’t manipulating time then how is it that getting to know Erica seemed like a beautiful period of forever that is completely in the distant past from all the torment of the last year? How can it just be that twelve months ago we were arguing over going to Wall-E (which she hated) and Hancock (which she loved)? How did things rise from nothing to such a zenith of bliss and back down again, if it’s only been a year?  
  
Erica found the tickets. She must keep everything. Or maybe like me that summer seemed magical. I couldn’t believe she kept the tickets. I stared at her and stared at her. Her hair is longer now and not so curly. Her face seems more tired and sharper. She has lost weight and been through a tough transformation. For a shining second there I saw her as I suppose I did then with a glow that memory or new love put on her where she was radiant. She still takes my breath away, but now it’s different. I feel the reality of life around us now and I am grounded in it. I know that I can really reach out and take her hand. This time I know that I am doing it for the right reasons and won’t run away.  
  
She made a startled ‘woof’ sound when I crushed against her in a hug, but then I felt her arms tighten around me in a hug. I wish that was the case when she laid that kiss on me in the elevator and then left me standing there in a panic. What if that night I had flexed and then went with it? Instead of beginning that avoidance and denial, get together downward spiral? I know, I know. Neither of us was ready. I just flipped through my diary. That’s why I turned to the aliens in the first place. Ay yi yi. Now I really wonder what winter will bring for us. And I am embracing the ‘us’. She may not know it yet, but there is an ‘us’ even if it’s platonic. There’s a carefulness and a strength between us that would feel like a break up were we to not see each other anymore. The hurt would be there just the same.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	64. Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Fall**_  
  
 _ **July 31, 2009**_  
  
Callie keeps looking at me. I catch her watching me, but she’s not embarrassed. She looks away because it’s polite, but then her look changes and I feel her eyes questioning mine. The confidence is overwhelmingly sexy. I can’t help but wonder what she sees. I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking.  
  
When she flashes me that devilish smile, or leans forward with her head in her hand and her eyes half closed as she regards me… Whoo. I wonder if she knows what I think about then. I feel hot as I imagine her knowing what I’m imagining and liking it. I even wonder as I look back at her and smile, if maybe she would want to re-enact some of those daydreams I have. On the balcony at Callie’s house I felt like I was home. As she told me about her leg, I wished that we had eaten inside so we were closer to her couch. I would have offered to massage her leg, or maybe help her forget about her pain by distracting her. Her loose sweat shorts would have made it so easy and I know how comfortable that couch is. I had to sip my wine slowly so that it didn’t go to my head.  
  
When I first go to know Callie little things snuck up on me. I didn’t even realize how close we were until she started to tell me how Yang was jealous. It just didn’t click that we had clicked so well at work and naturally had started to hang out more and more. I mean I knew that I had a new friend of course, but I didn’t realize the way we had gotten under each other’s skin. I think Sloan knew before either of us did and bless and curse the man for shoving us together even if it was for his own gratification. I’m not sure when we would have made that first leap on our own. At least consciously, overtly—well, it would have taken forever, but a well-placed dare and the cat was out of the bag clawing and hissing every which way. There was no putting a cap back on that flood of emotions and actions after that. I didn’t even know I had fallen for her. I didn’t even know that I could.  
  
Then we were close and closer and there was this tension between us. Addison asked Callie about it and I was shocked right up until I saw exactly what Addison saw. Oh to fall in the Fall, eh? And how the mighty fall? Walking away was so hard. I had realized by then of course, which was why I couldn’t let things go on when they were so far from right. I knew it would just be a downward spiral and unbelievably unhealthy. It didn’t lessen my thoughts of soldiers falling on swords in the slightest. I certainly felt the pain in my chest as the wound was ripped open and my heart exposed.  
  
This time.  
  
Oh, sweet heavens. This time. It’s like floating instead of falling. It’s like the second date where you’ve already kissed and yet you don’t really know if you should lean in for a kiss upon greeting or if you are still more on first date terms with a friendly hello and maybe a hug. Yet you both know you like each other and are all smiley and looking at each other and want to touch and it’s so painfully obvious and wonderful.  
  
I get the feeling that Callie is hanging back. Waiting for me, but I’m not sure. Then I wonder if she’s not sure, or is she not sure that I’m not sure… Yet, I feel no rush. If I am falling for this wonderful woman who has become even more wonderful with time, then I am in no hurry. I will love her more tomorrow than today.  
  
L. Love. There it is. I can’t unthink that. It’s funny that’s what fall means, right? But somehow just writing love without thinking about it tells me even more how deeply I have in fact fallen. Yet. I’m not weird about that. I know that we’ve only been re-connected for a month, but it’s not like we were starting from scratch. Instead if was like we had put our relationship on pause and then picked ourselves up out of the film set and settled back down to this film set and pushed play again. A spring forward like I was thinking about yesterday. Neva and I started from scratch and it took us a few months to really get the hang of each other, and what I went through with Callie helped that process immensely.  
  
Tomorrow is another day for me to work it all out. I’m going to show Callie the trail up to the view of the Hollywood sign. I can’t wait. I can’t believe she’s never been there.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	65. Passing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Passing**_  
  
 _ **August 1, 2009**_  
  
The valley is so much hotter than the beach. I have no idea why Erica wants to live up there. Dr. Hahn, Valley Girl, just doesn’t seem right. I hadn’t seen Erica since our beach walk at my house and it had been too long. Thinking about the year in between us, feeling like it had been too long since I’ve seen her, and the heat… I kissed her.  
  
Oh my god. I kissed her like I did outside the hospital, but not. No, no, no. It wasn’t like that at all.  
  
She walked me to my car. The sun sparkled in the highlights it had brightened from the darker blonde tresses and I lost my sentence. I completely just stopped the word in my mouth. I was looking at her face smiling at me. Her eyes were brighter—amused. Her skin was flushed and she was sweaty. I thought her upper lip would be salty if I tasted it. I felt more than I heard her saying goodbye. My hand was on the car door. It is already August. We met again in June. Time was passing by.  
  
I felt her words stop in my mouth as I pressed my lips against hers. My fingers held the back of her neck pressing sweaty strands of hair against her. I licked across her top lip. I really couldn’t help myself. She kissed me back just once and then I realized what I had done. I had broken that delicate line between us. I had reached across and grabbed her in a way that couldn’t be ignored as just friendly or accidental or a little familiar. I had kissed her in an ‘I want you now’ kind of way that would eventually have to be dealt with—out loud in a conversation or with some kind of deliberate eye contact and further motion. The rejection welled up in me and I was suddenly so afraid. I held her to me, not daring to pull back for eye contact, my forehead resting against hers, both of our breathing coming in short pants. We were on the street outside her building next to my car.  
  
Keeping my eyes closed and holding Erica to me like a shield against my fears of her, I whispered. “I wanted to ask you out, but I couldn’t. I guess I couldn’t hold back anymore.” Erica sucked in a breath and I knew she had to be thinking of everything and nothing—and I hoped she was wishing I’d kiss her again. “I know you have Neva. Or, or, or.” I just stuttered to a stop, because I didn’t really know too much. I knew that Erica and I had been talking on the phone, seeing each other for hikes and walks, but that we had carefully avoided EXACTLY THIS. “I want to ask you out.” I said more firmly. Then I pulled back and looked into her stormy blue eyes. I couldn’t tell what they were filled with. “I know this changes things, but I can’t help but want you, Erica.”  
  
I kissed her again. And she kissed back. A horn honked as a car drove by. We pulled away and laughed at each other. “Think about it.” I checked my watch knowing that Erica had to get ready for a gathering at Cedars that afternoon.  
  
Fuck. Now, I really want the aliens to take me away. If Erica doesn’t want me, I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know if I can share. I mean, I don’t know if I can bear to be around her and really be her friend, if she doesn’t choose me, if she instead chooses Neva. Oh. This hurts.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	66. Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Rain**_  
 __ ****  
August 5, 2009  
  
I slipped my scrub cap off as I stepped into the PICU. I hadn’t been there in a week or so since cases had changed. I tucked the cap in my pocket and then froze. I hadn’t heard from Neva, since that last strained phone conversation, but I supposed I had expected she’d let me know when she was coming back. Maybe she’d want a ride from the airport or something. I don’t have any idea what I thought, because I really hadn’t thought about it. She left me instead of walking into the fire of whatever I had to figure out with me. I understood that she was protecting herself, but wasn’t she also giving up? I don’t know.  
  
I felt like she wanted me to figure out what was going on with Callie and that she left with no timetable of return. I guess it was kind of like what Callie must have felt when I walked away. I just disappeared without really telling her anything. She knew I was mad, and surely the Chief or someone told her that I wasn’t coming back, but there had to have been a few moments where she just wasn’t sure. Usually people come back to work the next day.  
  
She was walking with a family toward the entrance of the PICU and I stepped behind the nurses’ station. We were both there to work, not socialize. I would expect her to not interrupt me. I watched her in action—so calm, warm, friendly with the worried loved ones. I wondered what the story was that brought them to the hospital. I wondered when Neva had gotten back. Briefly, I thought that she hadn’t intended on telling me. The family slipped through the door giving their passes back to the security guard at the door who checks people in. Neva paused facing the door for a moment and I saw as she inhaled and pulled herself up to her full height. I realized that she was bracing for impact with me. It hurt to know that she had to mentally prepare to face me. It hurt to know that I was the one that had made it this way.  
  
An awkward hug welcomed her back in town and the story about the fire alarm kid brought an easier smile to her lips. She looked good and I was glad to tell her so. Relaxed and like she had been in the sun. I wondered if there was a beach and a bikini wherever she went. She told me that she had read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and that I would love it. My dinner invitation was declined. However, she asked for a rain check, until the weekend. She had just gotten back and her place was a mess and she felt too disorganized. I understood, but still wished that things were different. Talking about patients over a quick lunch in the cafeteria was just not the same as personal time over a glass of wine.   
  
As she walked away, I wished that she had never left. I pondered how the ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ effect worked. I didn’t seem to realize how much I missed her, until she was back. I guess she had to go away, so I could really be happy she had returned. Maybe the same was true of Callie and we had to separate in order to come back together?  
  
Sigh. Together. Callie laid one on me on Saturday. I can’t say that I minded, because my lips were hungry for more, but I was surprised. It was hot. The hike had taken all of our energy. The view was nice with the marine layer burned off and the Hollywood sign in full view. I couldn’t believe she left after that. I mean, I know I had to come to the hospital for the memorial, but I would have liked some more—talking even. I couldn’t have been more surprised if it had started to rain at that moment.  
  
Watching Neva walk away was remarkably similar and confusing. I wanted more from each of them.  
  
Tomorrow, right? Another day.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	67. Snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Snow**_  
  
 _ **August 7, 2009**_  
  
Long hair-short. Brown eyes-blue. Dark hair-blonde. Close-far away.  
  
How come we always want what we haven’t got? How come we want change and yet for everything to stay the same? Why is the long road so fucking long? Were we engineered this way by those fucking aliens?  
  
This time it’s not what I want in myself, but what I want in someone else. I find that I long for that blonde blue-eyed woman more than ever before. What they don’t tell you about that whole ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ principle is that the fondness increases exponentially. I wonder if that’s how addicts feel? And if that’s why they have to go completely away from whatever their addiction is, instead of just have a little in moderation. I know that I can’t have a little Erica in moderation. I tried that. I tried to hold back. I tried to be friends. I tried to not want what I finally really and truly had arrived at accepting that I wanted.  
  
I miss Arizona. She knew how to distract me and keep me focused. She’d probably go to kickboxing with me. I could just see her giving one to Max right in the kisser when he tried to sass her.  
  
Between kickboxing, my new place, the wonders of finally being an attending at a grown-up hospital, and a few friends, I have been moving along pretty well here in the City of Angels. It’s not all wound tight like so many big cities where you have to spin yourself in circles on the spot to find hidden gems. Instead, it is a vast sprawling, changing metropolis that pulses like some kind of electrified amoeba with running shoes, booze, and freeways that never slow down. Where some cities remind me of a black and white spiral spinning ever more and more into itself, Los Angeles is a city that reminds me of a line drawing of perspective that is ever changing. Businesses close, new ones open, buildings are torn down, others stand tall on their grave and people move and swarm like bees in so many hives around the valley and out to the shore.  
  
I felt like a survivalist who had finally completed her kit when Erica and I seemed to be getting closer and closer. I had my map, my water, a tank of gas, some food, shelter, and a companion to survive with and for. At least that must have been the story developing in my mind, because that is sure the weight of what I feel the loss of—even if it was only in my mind. I still feel like I’ve suffered a great loss. That it may have only been in my mind, only serves to make it more embarrassing.  
  
I sit looking out at the waves in the summer heat in shorts and a t-shirt watching the sun go down and all I can wish for is winter. I want it to sweep over me like a smothering blanket letting me hibernate until I understand again. I need to go and re-charge and yet I am exactly where I want to be.  
  
Erica hasn’t called in the week since I kissed her.  
  
There is snow in my heart.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	68. Lightening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Lightening**_  
  
 _ **July 8, 2009**_  
  
Neva has left. We had lunch. I was granted personal time. It left me cold. Estranged—there is quite simply no other word for it. There is a past intimacy between us, shared knowledge, secrets already revealed—and yet the past tense of that was tangible between us. There was no fight and no overt statement of lines being drawn, but her demeanor made it all perfectly clear. Touching is fine, but will not be the norm. Fingertips should not linger. Hugs should not transform. Love must not flare beyond caring into passion.  
  
Neva focused on her travels, talking about people she met and feelings invoked by sights and sounds, and yet she never really revealed too much detail. I don’t know exactly where she went, whom she was with, or where she stayed. I don’t know when she came back exactly—just that one week when I was in the PICU I still had not seen her since her departure and the next time I was called in, there she was.  
  
I won’t get it right, but Neva said she had read a travel essay on the plane home that really inspired her and threw her into an introspective place. Her smile was radiant, but I knew I would never see what lit her from within. She was talking about the best part of traveling being the first moment when you are filled with hope, wonder, and the journey is still laid out before you. She could feel the sense of big change within her and the trip had been amazingly cathartic because it coincided with that budding feeling she had before she even left. She’s talked to a real estate agent about renting her house and HR about a leave of absence. I couldn’t help but wonder when she had really returned. Had she come back much earlier than I realized after a life-altering trip with some kind of guru? Had she been hiding from me at work, while I bumbled along wondering about this and that and wishing she was there to go through the fire with me?  
  
I told a few hospital stories and elaborated on the fire alarm story, but Neva carefully plotted a course through my stories that only let in work, household dailies, and my personal growth. Callie was carefully avoided, which I realized was probably for the best, but left me cold. Callie and I rarely talked about Neva, but she was always acknowledged as having a place in my life. From the few attempts we have had at serious talks, I can tell that Callie and I are both just awkward with new territory, not unwilling to traverse it—just unsure about how to go about it. Today with Neva, it was clear that we would not be discussing life that way—as the kind of friends that confide, nor ever as lovers trying to move on.  
  
Hours later, I’m still waiting for it all to sink in. I don’t know what I wanted, but that somehow wasn’t it. I know I can’t have both Neva and Callie in my life as full-on-intense lovers, especially not with such close proximity. Los Angeles is a big place, but not really, and certainly not when you narrow the career field. I wouldn’t want to juggle them anyway. I mean. That would be stressful. And I don’t think I could have the kind of full relationship I want with both at the same time. My mind can’t really get around that, but I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to happen either. I guess I thought that I would be deciding. Neva left with the sort of pretense that she still wanted me, but didn’t want to share me. Now she has returned to LA with the attitude of moving on with her life and having this great philosophical interaction with the world. I halfway expected her to tell me she was going to backpack Europe. And maybe she’s just being defensive. Maybe pushing me away is easier and safer than fighting for someone she might lose anyway. Callie’s destructive behavior at SGH drove me away, which meant she didn’t have to face me.  
  
I just feel like my life has become a T-Storm with thunder and lightening, crackling through the sky completely under the control or force of someone or something else instead of me. My life lived in the dark spaces between lightening cracks and serenaded by the distant rumbles of the thunder.  
  
Sigh. Tomorrow is another day. Hopefully not another storm. I think I could use some time away myself. Last week’s storm pressed Callie’s lips to mine and left me hungry for more. Oh god. I haven’t talked to Callie all week. Shit. This week with Neva and the cold front I really feel like the sky is changing. What am I gonna say to Callie? Sigh.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	69. Thunder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Thunder**_  
  
 ~~ **August 15, 2009**~~  
  
 **August 16, 2009**  
  
As a girl I always enjoyed the prelude to a storm. The air would change as the clouds crept in on silent winds dimming and then blocking the sun. If you were still outside denying the changes or waiting to feel the first drops of rain on your face then you could feel the moisture in the air. Looking back I’m never very sure if I was in denial or defying my mother so I could taste the rain. Given the last year or so, I wonder if it’s a combination of the two—denying that what I really wanted was to revel in that first splash of freedom on my tongue. Before Erica, I would have thought with my rocker-self that I was reveling in the freedom. I would have told you that I did it to defy my parents and relish the thrill of the world touching my skin. Looking back at this last year and my horrible reactions as my feelings for Erica emerged as part of a larger picture that I had just not seen… Well, I’d have to say that I think as a child before a storm I just stayed outside because I was in denial. I can just imagine my childhood-self standing with clenched fists and a stomped foot and yelling back to the house that ‘It’s not going to RAIN,’ even as the first drops landed softly on my hair and teamed up to soak into the cotton of my t-shirt.  
  
I can also see that same childhood-self realizing that it was in fact raining and looking down at the gathered drops of rain on my forearm before throwing my head back and laughing as I opened my mouth to embrace the change in the weather I had just vehemently denied.  
  
I remember being pulled in the house by my arm more than once regardless of motivation to stay out there. Once inside I would plaster myself to the nearest window watching as the water gathered and formed paths down the glass or darkened the street and then filled the gutters. I remember the sounds of the light rain pattering on the metal of the carport outside and then heavier falling sounds of a full rain. My heart sped up in time as the pitter patter increased until it reached its crescendo. Or if I was really lucky it would fade and my heart would swell as my breath fogged up the window and my hands against the glass grew chill and it would build again and again. A crack of lightning would ring out and I would wipe the glass and look wildly to see if I could still see the lightning bolt, or trace the evidence of it to my world-wide-view. Then the thunder would rumble and my knuckles would turn white as I pressed my fingers to the window wanting to capture it in my hands.  
  
I think this anticipation is similar to prepping for surgery and going through it. My heart beats the same way and I feel the change in the air as my body and mind prepare for the experience.  
  
  
  
  
And yet knowing all of that about myself, I sit here on a hot Sunday afternoon sated after a weekend of sexy summer storm rolling through the neighborhood on electrified winds and crashing into me like thunder after two weeks of the most distracted and horrible turbulence in my life in the form of Erica.  
  
How did I not sense a storm was coming? How did I not feel it on my skin and in the air around me?  
  
At first I was angry with her, but she didn’t let me deny my feelings behind anger. Not this time. Something has definitely changed in each of us and between us. Well. Duh. I just mean that it was obvious that a threshold had been crossed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she slapped some sense into me like Cher did to Nick Cage in Moonstruck. Oh…… If Erica had carried me off to bed kicking and screaming…  
  
She let me tell her off a bit, even looked sheepish for not having called, but she let me have my say, even while she insisted on staying. I would hear her out she said. I would hear her out or there would be nothing to hear anymore. I think my heart stopped. She reminded me of the avoidance time we went through in Seattle and said that she just really hadn’t prepared herself for my kiss. She blushed so red, when she admitted that she knew it would come between us somehow, but that even though she wanted more—she wanted to be certain about what kind of more. Then she said her caseload had gone crazy with a doctor rushing back to his family in Indiana and finding out that Neva was back. When I started to pull away, Erica stayed close. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, but it became clear that with me we were both willing to say 'awkward is awkward, but I want more and I want to get past awkward because I know it’s wonderful.'  
  
I didn’t let her say much after that. Oops. I agreed, she had reasons for being absent, I am not the ‘other woman,’ and I wanted to kiss her again. It had been two weeks and I was already so gone on her that her lips were just about all I could think about anyway. I knew that the rest was good from Seattle… Oh my heavens though. I think the aliens took Erica to some kind of exotic lesbian bootcamp planet though, either that or ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ has a few other implications. I guess we’ll need to talk and set some ground rules and things like that, but right now? I am reveling in the moment. My bed smells like Erica Hahn and my body feels thoroughly claimed by her as well.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	70. Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Storm**_  
  
 **August 19, 2009**  
  
It is always curious how things come about in life, I suppose. Interesting that I sit here thinking about how wonderful life has become after a series of turbulence. Ironic that Callie once more fills my heart and mind and yet the feeling is captured on a song from a CD that I got from Neva.   
  
Medical problems and life issues, sometimes they share so many characteristics that it’s like one is a metaphor for the other. An artery clogs and slows and complicates things into a heart attack causing a crisis that can be cleared in a variety of ways depending on how bad the circumstance is. Angioplasty, cardiac ablation, surgery, medicine—there’s a whole menu of options to deal with the range of possibilities presented. A crisis is dealt with and in ideal cases the patient feels better than they did originally. Unfortunately, given the fragile nature of existence there are many unhappy endings as well. Even though we live in a pepto-bismol coated Disneyland world founded by the Puritans—happy endings don’t always happen, especially not in the ER, ICU, PICU, or cardiology. Maybe Callie has more happy endings in orthopedics or maybe the tragedies just look different.  
  
In any case, I was thinking along the lines of something building and then festering and causing problems and then treated and the resultant peace, freedom and happiness that happens after.  
  
I guess the more apt comparison might be the clichéd comparison to a storm. Ha. Flipping back to last week I was thinking of life like a T-Storm. Last week the turbulence of the storm was filling my heart and mind. Callie’s kiss, Neva’s return, and the lack of my own ability to deal with the situation had left me feeling very off-balance with the workload. I couldn’t find my equilibrium, nor could I seem to let go.  
  
The storm has subsided. It was not easy and it has left damage, but it has cleared away much that needed clearing and the overwhelming feeling in the aftermath is tranquility.  
  
My friendship/relationship with Neva has been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Too many things are left unspoken between us and the time has apparently passed for the newness to wear off and we are left with what was an important friendship during a tough time. The storm has washed the sting of that away until I am left with a friend at a distance, which I find is actually all right with me.  
  
The chaos at work has settled as patients have been divided up more evenly in the aftermath of Joseph’s departure. The first couple of days were rough since a full gamut of surgeries had been scheduled for each of us and shifting things around was tricky. Some of the cases really needed to be handled right away, but after stepping on a few toes with other surgeons and postponing what we could, things have settled down.  
  
Callie. Callie. Callie. Callie. Sigh. If I close my eyes I can still feel her skin against mine. She is the soothing raindrops soaking into my skin making me feel grounded in the earth and cleansed inside out. She is the thunder rumbling through my very core. She is the lightning sparking me to change, to be better, to reach out, and to cling to her as we shelter together in the storm of life and look at it with wide eyed wonder as it transforms us once again.   
  
Tomorrow is another day and I look forward to seeing Callie with each minute that passes by. I have a feeling that the initial storm has passed and now we can truly fall into each other. Sigh.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	71. Broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Broken**_  
  
 **August 19, 2009**  
  
Love is a rollercoaster. Love is a daisy. Love is patient.  
  
Ha. Patient. Who the hell wrote that? And what were they thinking? Love is rollercoaster that is sometimes working and sometimes not. Like when you go to Disneyland and Space Mountain is working and you enjoy it, but when you go back later in the day for another thrill, then it isn’t running. Carrying your disappointment, you take off over to fantasy land or adventure land filling the rest of your day. In the back of your mind though, you still really want to go on Space Mountain again. Sometimes you check back in the evening to see if it’s up and running. If you’re lucky, then the ride is up and running. Other times you have to go on to the other park and come back. You ride it again knowing that things go wrong on a regular basis, that you’ll never really understand or that you’ll ever really know about.  
  
Sigh. I guess that’s patience too. You ride the ride. You want more. You come back again. You bide your time and try again. You accept that this time the ride is working again. Or you walk away in disappointment that the ride is still down. That’s patience or love of the ride. Ha. Or maybe it’s insanity—that’s right—doing the same thing over and over again. Then again, I’m not the first to compare love to mental illness, am I?  
  
I think the Erica rollercoaster is broken again. It’s been three days and my mind has done nothing but circle back to our time together. I’ve only called twice because, yeah, the ride must be broken. I haven’t even gotten a text back. At least I was able to leave short messages instead of stupid rambles. I probably would have asked her if the aliens gave her a lobotomy—because who does that? It’s not like this is the first time she’s disappeared on me, but at least in Seattle I knew she was pissed. I knew when she walked away that there was some kind of invisible line being crossed. Of course I thought that we would fight it out in some way. When Erica left on Sunday, I had no feeling of a line being crossed. Well, I mean I thought that we had crossed several lines—together—and that we were somehow in a different place than we had been, but I had thought it was together. I thought we were together.  
  
On Monday, I was busy. I figured she was too. On Tuesday I called and then figured that she was covering that caseload issue at her work. Or maybe had to talk to Neva. Or, well, I don’t know, but I didn’t want to think that we had shared the end of the weekend together like that and then come to some kind of crashing halt. Another unanswered message today at lunch leaves me cold. Did she reconcile with Neva after all? Did Neva realize what she was missing or giving up?   
  
I want to go to Erica’s to find out. I want to call again. I want to go to kickboxing class and find someone bigger than me and pick a fight. I want to… I hate feeling like this. I hate feeling like I’m back in Seattle. Although, I have to admit the thought of pushing Meredith Grey against that locker is a great feeling. I just wish there was someone I could do that to right now, but I guess the only one to blame here is me. I got back on that same ride that may or may not have been broken. Damn it. Love is a daisy—a picked one. It’s pretty for a short period of time and then it’s wilted and gone. At least daisies can be tossed in the trash fairly easily, and a new one found quick like.   
  
Nah. Love is just insanity. I guess I’ll call her again tomorrow. I gotta see this through I guess. Hopefully not to the end. There I go again living on hope. Kickboxing is tomorrow at least. Maybe I’ll show up early for some warm-up time.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	72. Fixed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Fixed**_  
  
 **August 23, 2009**  
  
When I told Callie in Seattle that I didn’t have many friends, I meant it. I only have a handful and they are scattered all over the country. We don’t talk much and when we do—it’s usually about work. I made friends in Seattle with Callie and then fell in love with her. I made friends with Neva here in LA and then fell into, well, if it wasn’t love then at the minimum I fell into bed with her. The truth is I don’t know what I’m doing. Still. And I hate that. I would ask the friend I have here in LA, but since I’ve fallen out of bed with her, I don’t think that she’ll help me with how to talk to Callie. I really need the help too. With all the hustle and bustle and changes going on with Neva and Callie—I didn’t get a chance to call. I went home each day and fell into bed exhausted and thinking of Callie. And how great it would be when I could see her next.   
  
What is it they say about intelligence and common sense? They don’t go together or something like that. I can operate on a heart. Hell, I can operate on the whole body. I can increase chances of survival, but I can’t seem to increase my chances for success at life—well love. My success quantified by professional standards is pretty darn successful. According to my mentor at John’s Hopkins, who was as goal-oriented as I wanted to be, would say that I’m an unqualified success. However I don’t think that Neva or Callie would agree, because I don’t agree. I have finally figured out that there’s more to life than my work, and what’s more that my work is enriched by those things in life that are outside of work. I feel like I finally figured things out only to arrive and find that the event is over and life has passed me by.  
  
I don’t know what to make of it all. The closest I’ve come to failure was a B on my first O-chem exam back in undergrad. Back then I could take steps to study more effectively and move on from my mistake. I had to study smarter not harder. It simply required a shift in tactics.  
  
I didn’t call Callie after the weekend. I thought of her every free minute. That’s the thing—I thought of her and didn’t tell her. Apparently a big difference even if it felt like a small oversight. So after returning my call long enough to tell me why she wasn’t going to be returning my calls, I at least understand.  
  
My head hurts, as do my eyes and my heart. I lay there for hours but just couldn’t sleep. Knowing that she really isn’t talking to me is so much harder than thinking that I tried to call her and just didn’t catch her for whatever reason. The thing is I didn’t know what was broken and now that I do—I don’t know how to make sure it gets fixed. I can’t study smarter—Callie is not a subject to be learned.  
  
Hey that’s it. Maybe she is a subject to be learned. She kissed me and it took a week for me to get back to her. Had I been listening better I would have realized that she was pretty clear about the not calling all week being a problem. I was too busy trying to explain that Neva and I were through and that work was insane with the changes. Now that I’ve sat and thought about it and replayed Callie’s words in my mind—I can see it was the not calling that did it. Just as sure as I could track the mistakes on my O-chem test to certain skills in identifiable chapters, my mistake in this case can be traced back to a lack of communication. The question is—can I fix this? Can I be a smarter lover? Callie didn’t say to not call, so I have to take that as a door left open.   
  
And tomorrow is yet another day. So help me, but Monday is going to be horrible.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	73. Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Light**_  
  
 **August 30, 2009**  
  
My rollercoaster of love has gone into the tunnel, but there is light at the end. I hope. I sincerely hope so.  
  
Erica is apparently an idiot when it comes to communication, but bless her—she’s determined not to fail.  
  
I suppose, I can’t say that I’m an ace communicator either. In Seattle, we both shut down. This time in LA, Erica shut down because I finally made a move that I was ready for. So instead of retreating to my own hiding place in the basement or library or whatever, I waited and made myself crazy. Then when she came around I basically tackled her. Then she had a bear of a week and didn’t call. She should have called. There’s no excuse. However, it was understandable and she did tell me what I wanted to hear. She and Neva were over. It was awkward between them.   
  
I should have let her talk some more, or at least I should have talked to her after I tackled her. Whatever. Once again, I should have listened and talked a little more than I did, or we did. When Erica called back I didn’t answer. I don’t know if that was right or wrong. When she called again I was busy. When she called again I deliberately left my phone on the counter when I went to kickboxing. I called her back and she listened. She listened just like last time, only this time I didn’t let her talk back and I couldn’t tackle her. Thank god I didn’t tell her not to call. She just might have listened, because she sure has been very determined.  
  
I don’t know if the aliens programmed her with some kind of subroutine that would enable her to reassess the situation, or if she talked to someone (I hope it wasn’t Neva). She still hasn’t called. Rejection is no one’s friend, but in the last week not a day has gone by without a text, email, or even flowers. I don’t know if she read a handbook, or what, but she is definitely trying to woo me and definitely succeeding. Then again, it helps that I was already woo-ed. Today’s card let me know where she was coming from:  
  
 _No matter my schedule I will make time for you._  
I do my best to learn from my mistakes.   
If I have learned the wrong lesson, perhaps you’ll correct my path.  
  
The flowers really are beautiful. I’m just glad she didn’t send daisies. I might have had to scream. I definitely would have cursed the aliens for reading my journal. It’s bad enough that they mess with the universe, or at least my life, they shouldn’t stoop so low as to read my journal. I sent her a picture of the lovely bouquet and a note that she seemed to be on the right track. It has felt nice to be woo-ed from afar this week. I just hope that the first date isn’t once again awkward. I don’t think I want to go through all of that again. I think I’d like to proceed from some good solid talking right into heavy petting… What can I say? I just can’t shake the knowledge of how good it felt to go to bed with Erica—and how much better it felt to wake up with her. A solo bed and a bed shared are just so different. Neither is bad, but waking up in a shared bed is good when you can get it. The trick I am finding with those damn slippery aliens is to keep that shared bed amidst all the very funny obstacles that they like to lay in our path.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	74. Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Dark**_  
  
 **August 30, 2009**  
  
Growing up, I went to a primitive camp whose only power was a generator. Most of the time no one noticed this. The generator was turned on before most of the camp was awake and turned off after most of the camp had gone to sleep. There had to have been some staff up and about, but other than that it was just people with trouble sleeping, like me. There was a brief period of time when the generator would go off and the silence was so obvious. I was always amazed by this fact, because we took the power for granted all the time. Somehow it made the screened in cabin that much more dark. For a few minutes it was as if I couldn’t hear anything, then there was the breathing of the other girls, the occasional human noise, a door slam somewhere and noises that you weren’t sure what they were but hoped it was just someone getting up to go to the bathroom. There were times when I would wake later only to discover that the quietude had deepened in a profound way and I could imagine that I heard the stars scratching the sky. In the morning, all was light and bright again and the woods were full of the noise of campers rising, counselors shouting, doors slamming and underneath it all the purr of the generator. I always took a moment or two listening until I could hear each element back and back to that base hum. It was comforting like a heartbeat. I wonder if that is in part what attracted me to the heart in particular in the human body.  
  
Reacquainting myself with Callie was like the daytime at camp—filled with fun and activity and taking for granted that background hum. Getting back together with her was like an evening celebration around the campfire. Messing up and not calling her—that was like the summer when we all woke up and had cereal and water and the generator didn’t come on. The whole day didn’t feel right and when lunchtime came and then dinner, we were once again treated to a minimal meal. It was explained that the generator had broken and that they were working on fixing it. We didn’t notice it so much when we went canoeing or made bracelets, but in the evening that hum wasn’t there comforting in the background and I knew it. I wondered if the others noticed it at all or not. The dark that night was overwhelming because somehow all the sounds had been subdued all day and now it was still for once. Callie telling me I had messed up was like that. I could work and get things done, but in the background I knew it wasn’t right and I hated it. It only took a day or two and they were able to fix the generator or bring in a back up until they could fix it. They didn’t tell us that. All we knew was that the hum was back and breakfast included bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns.   
  
It took them a day or two and it has taken me a full week to fix what was broken. Callie finally texted me today. I feel like the hum is back in my life. I know that we have a lot to talk about and a lot to square away as far as expectations, but I think she knows that I’m willing to learn. In some respects it was easier in Seattle because we worked together and the chances of seeing each other and talking at least a little bit were quite high. When we were avoiding each other it was actually quite difficult. Now that we know what we want—each other—we don’t work together and have to make that effort to communicate each day. With Neva, the communication was easy because once again we worked at the same hospital. Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks, eh? Maybe tomorrow I’ll give her a call, now that I know I’m on the right track. Well, Monday, tomorrow is another day. Hopefully, it will be a good one.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	75. Shade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Shade**_  
  
 **September 6, 2009**  
  
It is never easy to tell a young athlete full of hope that they must pin their dreams on something else. As much as I enjoy the glory of rebuilding a knee, replacing a hip, or just popping a shoulder back into place, sometimes in ortho I just have to tell someone that this time they’ve gone too far or life’s events have conspired against them. I don’t walk on the razor’s edge of life and death in most of what I do—a sprained ankle, tennis elbow, and even torn muscles don’t cause much in the way of life ripples. Well, most of the time anyway. I remember a girl coming in one time in Seattle who had sprained her knee in a soccer tournament game. The mother was quick to blame the sport, while the father and girl turned to me for any kind of counteracting statement. I told them that she could have just as easily sprained her knee getting out of the bathtub or coming down off a stool from the top cupboard in the kitchen. It didn’t matter. As they were leaving the woman clearly forbid her daughter to play anymore soccer. She continued out of the exam room ahead of them and I caught the father and girl exchanging a sad look before he held her crutches out to her.  
  
I didn’t agree with the mom that time, but today I would have. Today I would have given quite a lot for that same kind of well-meaning but over cautious care to be wrapped around a young football player whose season will not be getting off the ground this year and whose possible career needs to be shifted from wide receiver to lawyer or bee keeper or orthopedic doctor. There are worse things he could become really. Instead he is being pushed by the kind of coach I hated as a kid and ignored by a high-powered mom who barely had time to show up after he had been at the hospital for two hours.   
  
When you want them to loosen up, they just clamp down harder. When you want them to protect and care just a little bit, they push you to take risks and ignore the obvious pain you’re in. It’s soooooo weird. Every parent was a child at some point. Maybe every child doesn’t become a parent, but you can’t say it the other way around. It’s just amazing that we never seem to learn balance or that we don’t try to be better than our own parents. I guess we are human and not alien and we still haven’t figured out that basic balance. Erica and I are still learning the same lessons that we started over a year ago in Seattle and we just didn’t see them then and now we just failed them at the first go. Like stepping on a booby trap wire and then knowing that booby traps exist, but still falling for it the next time because we didn’t know they meant that they were right there (oh there!) and then going out of that room, resetting the booby trap, and going back into it to pass with flying colors. I can only hope that’s true for Erica and I. In Seattle, we had no idea what we were doing. It really was as if we were virgins all over again and hadn’t learned anything at all from our previous life’s interactions. In LA, well, we knew there were obstacles, but we somehow didn’t think they applied to us. Now we know and now we’re moving forward. Contact everyday, even if it’s short is important. I had to learn that one too! Right after Erica and I didn’t speak for a full week, then I blew it by not keeping up all the next week with her. At least she was gentle when she called me on it. We both blushed and she was so cute how she stopped and started and set her jaw and looked away and then squared her shoulders and presented the facts of the case like our relationship was a patient and we were discussing the case file. Oh. Adorable. And even though I was in trouble, I think she would have let me pounce her, but I resisted. And horny as hell, I still think that was the right decision. We’re talking more because we have to. I think it will show in how close we are when we do get back in bed together. And we will. Oh, yes, we will. Indeed. I can’t wait to see what else those aliens on the lesbo boot camp have taught her.  
  
Sigh. Anyway. It was so hard to talk to the boy today and be gentle and firm with him so I didn’t make his pain any worse—while at the same time practically wrangling the father out into the hallway to get some facts straight about statistics and to ask him some hard questions about what kind of wheelchair he wanted to push his son around in if he didn’t let up. People can be so aggravating. I was waiting for him to tell me that I didn’t understand because he wanted the best for his kid and I didn’t have any so I couldn’t get it. I’m soooo glad that he didn’t say anything of the kind. I may not be a parent, but having worked with a wide variety of physical ailments at all levels from first injury to twelfth and from jammed finger to rebuilding legs—I think I know what can happen to an athlete that pushes too hard to come back too fast and gets injured again and then repeats the process. As an outside observer who knows the human body and sports, I think I get it in ways that he will never understand either.  
  
I went and sat out in the waiting room. I don’t do it that often, but every now and again I think it’s important to listen to the people in the waiting room and the variety of interactions going on there. It’s usually enough to pull me away from whatever case has been wearing on me.  
  
An older girl was reading to her little sister from The Giving Tree. Well, that’s the relationship I thought that they had. Maybe they were cousins or something.  
  
I watched them losing myself in the moment of their time together that will likely be forgotten on the conscious level, but the care that would seep in between them on the subconscious one. I thought of times in my own life when my mother would read that book to me, or later when I would read it to her. My father would always come in at the end and would say, “You can shear a sheep many times, but only skin it once.” My mother would groan and I would laugh. I remembered thinking that it was sad that the tree was so giving to the boy and the boy just used it for his own benefit until the end when it was just him and what was left of the tree. I guess that’s why my father always used to say that—the apples were gone, the wood was gone, the shade was gone and there was nothing left to give just like the farm animal skinned. I think the tree version is less gross.  
  
My favorite part is at the beginning when the boy loves the tree and curls up in its shade. I like the idea of having someone to play with, get sustenance with, and curl up with in times of rest, safety, and love. I don’t like that the tree gave everything and the boy took it away to be happy elsewhere. I never have liked that. It’s like the part of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy just watches the sand slip by when she could knock it over on its side and get away. I guess it’s a metaphor for parenting because the parent or caregiver shares all that they have with the child hoping to help provide for its happiness. Maybe I could accept that if the tree had another tree to be friends with or something—like those trees that twist together as they grow.  
  
In the book the tree and the boy have to shift what they can offer as options are reduced for them. Their understanding of what will make them happy changes over time. I think my athlete has to do the same. He can no long play the level of sports that he had been. He will still need exercise, but competitive high school football followed by the rigors of college ball and the hope of going pro. Well, those things are probably out of the picture now and what will make him happy will have to shift.  
  
I get that resources have to come from somewhere, but relationship wise… I want Erica and I to equally or as equally as possible to provide play, sustenance, and shade to each other. I think play will be the easiest and then I think that shade will come naturally. When I was hurt at kickboxing just her voice and offer to help eased my mind. I think right now we are working on the sustenance. I guess that’s about right since that’s the part that will sustain us. Sigh. I must be tired playing with all the variations of the root word there.  
  
Um, aliens. You’ve been kinda quiet for a week or so now and I don’t want to upset you or anything, but can you maybe lay low for a while longer? It’s nice having Erica back and practicing all the things we’ve learned about ourselves and about each other. Besides I don’t think she’s properly shown me all of her bootcamp skills. Wink wink.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	76. Who

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Who**_  
  
 **September 7, 2009**  
  
In my continued journey of opening up, I accepted an invitation to a BBQ at a park. Sometimes I forget that’s what people do—have BBQs on long weekends. I guess they either travel or grill something. Or they march on through life unaware. Even though I have a day off—I often forget that it’s an ‘occasion.’ It was near enough to my home and I knew the host reasonably well. It may not have been reaching very far outside my comfort zone, but it was still more social than going for a run on my own and then lazing around on the couch watching a Star Wars marathon. Although those are so good, you really can’t complain if someone does that. Especially since most of us don’t watch them on a regular basis so it’s nice to get reacquainted. I managed to catch part of one before I had to leave for the BBQ anyway and it was great to see Jar Jar Binks. He’s one that I remember, but always kind of forget at the same time.   
  
One of the kids was trying to fly his kite and not having any luck. For some reason he chose me to help him. Children have some kind of weird logic or animal instincts or something. Sometimes they find the most nurturing to their needs, but sometimes—like when they pick me—I think they are choosing somehow to help the adult instead. Perhaps it’s nothing cosmic at all and I was just the nearest adult who happened to look up at the right time and that was that.   
  
I guess on some level who is chosen for anything is unlikely. Who would have picked Benjamin Franklin to be such a smart guy? One who could work the backroom politics and at the same time fly his kite in the rain and catch electricity. Who would pick me to be their friend and later their partner? Leave it to Callie to see something my hidden potential, I guess.   
  
Perhaps the who is just as important as the when? Perhaps all of us are capable of a great many things. Perhaps we just need to meet the person that sparks with what is going on with us at the time. I have been in a reflective place lately, gosh it seems like I’ve always been in a reflective place. In Seattle I became reflective and before that I think I was just ambitious. And I have been reflective since I left Seattle. Los Angeles might not be thought of as a place that people go to think, but in the sense that it was somewhere different, it has become my place of reflection. I suppose that in Los Angeles anyone can be anything—it is the home of Hollywood after all. The most famous city in America and it’s not even a city.   
  
I was able to help the kid to fly his kite. It was a moment of triumph for both of us. However when his kite fell again with the wind, I was able to teach him how to replicate the process. By the end of a half an hour he could get the kite back in the air after each successive wind drop. I may not have been who anyone would have chosen as a teacher, or a mentor, or to be good with a kid at a BBQ, but I was able to rise to the challenge. Once again I think that is connected to the when. Had I not had the experiences of the last year or two, then I probably would not have been as successful as I was today. Perhaps the me of two years ago would have helped him get it in the air and then made sure to leave to the otherside of the park to avoid future calls for help. Assuming of course that old me would have even gone to the BBQ in the first place.  
  
Smoothing down my clothes as I returned to my bench seat I was glad that I came, not only to the BBQ but to Los Angeles and into myself. I couldn’t wait to call Callie on my way home. Since we’ve re-connected we have been having philosophical discussions. A thing that I think only comes with time and growing. I hung up amazed not only at the who that I have become, but also that I am able to share that with the who that Callie has become. How remarkable to be able to be such a catalyst for each other, and to still feel such an incredible connection and to continue to be a part of each other’s growth. We didn’t just hit and run in Seattle like bumper cars. Or maybe we did hit and run, but some of our car’s paint wore off on the other of us or something. And then we got out and walked around on our own for a bit, but now we are in the same rollercoaster car and traveling together. What a thought. Maybe that’s why we are rare? It is too changing for most people to go through that much growth because of each other, but not together, and then to still be able to see through that to the person loved before. While we are better, I think we are still quintessentially ourselves. She still has that megawatt smile and I still roll my eyes. She’s open to an idea immediately, while I am more hesitant. She reaches out to people without hesitation, while I do it with practiced ease.   
  
We have a date for Wednesday night. It was nice to remember our date-date conversation, but know that the majority of details from that time period will not be going with us. I was thrilled that she didn’t let me forget the final component of a date: trying to take clothes off. It gives me hope that starting over doesn’t have to be at a snail’s pace. We don’t have to be a pair of cheetahs in a race, but after reacquainting myself with her, her body, and our bodies together two weeks ago… Well, I find that it does only take once to create an addiction. As much as I love our talks and our time, I yearn for sleepy mornings together and half awake smiles and kisses that end up snoozes. I think it’s not a warmth of heat; no, we have enough heat in LA, but it’s a warmth of the heart. I can’t explain it. And really? I don’t want to.  
  
Tomorrow is another day and another day closer to Callie.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	77. What

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—What**_  
  
 **October 19, 2009**  
  
Waking up next to Erica has become normal. How did that happen? In such a short time we have gone from so careful with each other and holding back to sharing everything. It is like we were on this same road originally and took a detour only to be back together on the same road. There’s nothing wrong with other roads. Like that boy last month—other dreams or goals are worthwhile and fulfillment can be found no matter what life throws at us. I think I would have found my way in LA. I needed a change from Seattle no matter what—like a plant that had outgrown its pot and needed to be relocated. Luckily enough my path connected back to Erica’s and I didn’t have to find out what was over the fence in life. Arizona had given me a glimpse of a world outside the one I was in. She helped to open my eyes and has stayed a strong support, but I’m glad I didn’t have to find out what else was out there.  
  
Normally it is hard to wake me up. I have more than one alarm set on any given day. I grumble and groan. I pull the pillow over my head and burrow into the covers deeper. It’s a lifetime habit. Even as a kid I used to do that. My mother would yank the blankets off my body. So I began tucking them under my body like a wrapped up papoose. My mother was persistent though—she’d dip her fingers in iced water and let them get extra cold before laying them against my cheek or any other part of my body she could reach. The shock was usually enough to force me to consciousness—albeit an unhappy consciousness. I could snooze back into sleep after just about anything, but the cold finger treatment broke the spell so entirely that there was no hope for going back to sleep. It didn’t mean I didn’t try to go back to sleep, just that there was no hope for it happening.  
  
Now I wake up and I mean really wake up and the first thing I see is Erica and the first thing I smell is Erica and the heat near my skin is Erica. It’s really quite amazing and I really can’t believe how afraid I was originally. I snuggle tighter against her and while I still don’t want to get up—I wake up much happier than I ever have before.   
  
I would have thought that Erica was an early riser. She’s so business-like and goal oriented. I would have thought that she’d wake up at the first buzz of the alarm, shower, prepare and grab that To Do list as she stepped out the door on her way to conquer the world. I know better now. Sometimes she shrugs me off and even moves away in an effort to get farther away from me and stay in the land of dreams. Once she accepts that it’s me then she grabs me and pulls me where she wants me. I’ve tried talking to her, but she doesn’t respond. I know she’s awake when she kisses or snuggles her face against my arm.  
  
Good morning has never been so good. Thank you, aliens. You didn’t totally derail my happy ever after.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	78. Where

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Where**_  
 ****  
October 27, 2009  
  
Change happens all the time whether we are ready for it, want it, or not. Accepting that is no easy feat. For me it is certainly not an easy thing to do. I want to be in charge of changes in my life like a new job or a new car or a new coffee shop to go to. So far in my life I’ve been able to do just that—to be in charge of pretty much everything. Except people I guess. I can’t figure them out any more than I can make them stay. So I guess I just have to be as aware as I can be of dynamics and accept that I can’t stack the deck on this one.  
  
I chose Callie as my lover. Neva chose to leave my life.  
  
Do positive things in life always have to be accompanied by a negative? Is that one of Newton’s laws?  
  
Neva has taken a job on the other side of the country. Her leaving party was last night. I can’t blame her—when a change is needed, sometimes a fresh start is what is called for. Neva only talked to me once when I was leaving. She hugged me, kissed me on the lips and told me she loved me. Where did that come from? We had never said I love you. We weren’t meant to, I think. Whatever purpose we were meant to serve in each other’s lives, in the end I don’t think love like that was it. Neva enriched my life; I can only hope that I enriched her life as well. Hopefully, the lesson wasn’t about heartache, but about sharing with another. As much as Neva gave in her work life every single day with every single patient and their family—I don’t think that she gave much in her personal life.   
  
I didn’t give much in my life—neither professional nor personal. In some ways Callie ripped the lid off in my personal life, which caused me to shut down and run away. However the lid was off no matter where I went next. So I did the only thing that I could do—I took control back. If I was going to be more open and less hard ass, then I was going to do it on my terms. I would open up little by little in a controlled way at work—which is the area of my life that I know the most about and have the most control over. It makes even more sense that the two people I have cared about the most and really tried to let in have been from work. They were connected to the area of my life that I felt the most control over and felt we had that work dedication in common. I’m willing now to take those risks personally more than ever before thanks in part to my time shared with Neva. But we were not at the ‘I love you’ stage and I don’t think that even without Callie coming into my life… I just don’t think that she and I were really going that direction. I can’t know who or what I was to Neva. Maybe she did think that was the relationship that we were to have? I hope that despite any pain I’ve caused (like Callie caused me), that it will be a catalyst for growth and change in a good way. Sometimes overcoming adversity leads to a breakthrough.  
  
I hated calling Callie to tell her that I wasn’t coming over, but I just felt like a night alone to process was the right thing to do. I guess I’ll just have to make it up to her tonight. She seems to like it when I go all ‘nympho’ on her as she calls it. Tomorrow is another day, but I hope that tonight never ends. (See what she does to me?)  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	79. When

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—When**_  
  
 **November 26, 2009**  
  
Thanksgiving came early this year. I had to tell Erica about my parents. I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to deal with it. I knew that she’d ask at some point though. I know that I need to deal with it, because it is real. They disowned me. Well, they didn’t disown me so much as hang up on me. Then I got a letter saying that they didn’t accept my lifestyle. What was that? I was having a horrible time. I was heartbroken. I was alone. And they made it worse.  
  
Talking about it with Arizona blunted the edge of that pain so that I could get through the day to day. She helped me to sort out issues I had control over and those I didn’t. She helped me to deal with ones I could deal with in the here and now, and how to put the others in a box for re-visiting. She left before she could talk me though that part though. I wonder if she knew how or if had she stayed would she have drawn a blank too. Perhaps it is different for each of us; and being aware of the box and forcing ourselves to go through it from time to time is the process we have to go through to become better.  
  
I called Arizona. She was happy for Erica and I finding each other again. She told me to let Erica in. I had to tell her what had gone on in the time we were apart and I had to let her in completely. I told Arizona that I loved Erica; she asked if I had told her. When I had no answer, she said it again.  
  
Erica knew something was bothering me. She insisted on cooking a meal at my place and she even offered that she could go home if that was best for me. I pulled her onto the couch and told her about my parents. She held me and didn’t say much. I found that she didn’t need to say anything. Just her being there was enough.  
  
When I had finally calmed down she asked if that was when I decided the aliens had taken me. I couldn’t stop laughing. Maybe it was the stress of the situation, the fatigue of worrying about it on some level in the back of my mind, or maybe it was just that Erica’s timing was impeccable.   
  
In any case she knew when—to pamper me, give me space, hold me tight, and say the right thing. She couldn’t take away what they said and she couldn’t tell me that they would come around. However she could be there for me in a solid way that told me she wasn’t going anywhere. And she could distract me with something else entirely so as to make it less oppressive. When did Erica become the girl with timing and communication skills? Why didn’t I see her for who she was way back when? When did we become the exact person that the other needed? Or at least when did she become the person I needed? And am I the person that she needs? Gosh, I hope so. On this Thanksgiving I am thankful that Erica and I have come back into each other’s lives.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	80. Why

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Why.**_  
  
 **November 27, 2009**  
  
How do we keep getting closer and closer together? In Seattle, Callie and I were so close that it scared me. From the first meeting in Los Angeles, we were somehow closer than we were then. Only I wasn’t afraid anymore. Maybe it was because I was busy with Neva and so I knew that Callie couldn’t hurt me that way again. Except that with Neva leaving, I was with Callie and didn’t have that shield. We just kept getting closer and closer. Yes, we were intimate and that provided a certain connection, but somehow that isn’t what has made us closer. When we fell into bed and then went on time out we still were getting closer and closer. We talk more and about more things. We know each other differently now.  
  
Yesterday was thanksgiving. Why are holidays always so intense?  
  
I mean I know why: Anniversaries of things come and gone, times changed or changing, and reunions for better or worse with family. I lost my mother relatively young to a drunk driver. After that, my father and I had an uneasy relationship. We are in contact, but simply not close.   
  
I don’t know what Callie has lost, because I myself didn’t have it. All I can know is that she is hurting.  
  
Why anyone would reject another in that way, I can’t pretend to understand. I could see being shocked or perhaps doubtful. I could see turning away from someone that had an addiction or broke the law in some heinous way. Maybe if Callie had, oh, I don’t know, stolen a heart or something, then maybe I could see them rejecting her. But she didn’t. She speeds on the freeway like most people, and she drinks too much coffee, and eats in the bedroom when I’m not looking, but she hasn’t done anything that someone should reject her for in that sense. I suppose that I rejected Callie in Seattle, but that certainly wasn’t based on her being a lesbian. Sleeping with someone else while trying to begin a relationship with someone else, well, it’s not a good way to begin in any case. But it had nothing to do with sexuality—communication and sex with inappropriate people perhaps but not sexuality.  
  
Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I am so thankful that Callie and I have found each other again. You don’t get very many second chances in life. I hope to really make the most of this second chance—to make it a new life for myself. I didn’t have a lot to say, but it seemed that making a nice dinner, giving emotional space, and listening were enough. Why do we put ourselves through so much? Why do we put each other through so much? Why do we let others question us instead of support us?  
  
Callie’s tears were warm against my cheek and her sobs were heart breaking. She had so much pent up inside of her. I wish I had been there for her, but at the same time I know that I was not meant to be that person for her until now. Whatever has changed us in the last year has changed us for better or worse in order to be the right people for each other. Sometimes out of something bad, we learn something good. Tomorrow is another day and I look forward to seeing the small ways that Callie and I continue our journey together.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	81. How

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

**_Fanfic 100—How_**  
  
 **December 15, 2009**  
  
How in the world did Erica Hahn get this far in life without being the weird kid, or the popular kid, or the nerdy kid, or the cocky kid, or the athletic kid? Did she grow up in a bubble? She’s a little clueless now, but most doctors are in some way or another. Like I told Finn the hospital is just high school with scalpels. Doctors are brilliant in many respects, but in others… Well, high school with scalpels pretty much says it all, I think.  
  
I always thought that Derek and Mark were just being mean when they were talking about Erica. I know she’s not totally clueless—she called them Pretty and Prettier on her first day to put them in their place. However when she talks about school… I have to say those boys had a point. I don’t think Erica ever climbed a tree, jumped staircases, climbed up on the roof, or made out behind the bleachers. On the other hand I don’t think that she was called weird, sat in the back or ate her hair.  
  
Each of us really do walk our own road through life, I guess. I mean she wasn’t interested in the lives of gunslingers and cowboys so that she could be closer to some boy in her history class. She didn’t have to throw up when guys came onto her in high school after telling her that her one true love had said she was a good easy lay. She didn’t have to change schools and rebuild her heart, her reputation, and her willingness to share with others.  
  
Then again. At some point she went through it all, didn’t she?  
  
I flipped back to see what I wrote about Samuel when I started this diary—Erica was my first in the sense of girl crush, girl sex, and girl love. In that sense she was the beginning even though it was a very different set of circumstances and much later in life.  
  
For Erica, I was her first: her first girl crush, girl sex, and her first girl love. We haven’t said it—not back in Seattle and not now. It’s there in every touch and every look. Sigh. But we have learned I guess and we are going slow even if we jumped into bed, then back out of it, and back into it after some talking. We’ve jumped into seeing each other and sleeping over each other’s houses all the time instead of spread out like a special treat. On the other hand, we aren’t rushing to say things. I know I’ve never cared about someone this much without saying I love you before—but then I don’t think those are case studies I should follow. George. Sigh.  
  
It’s all freaking related. I’m back to looking at my first entry and my first entry goes to my first love all the way back to middle school and even though I’ve graduated I’m still in high school with scalpels. Perhaps I’m finally in the advanced program or perhaps I’ve come back to teach, but I’m still here. That first entry and those first lessons are just always going to be with me. “These emotions are incredibly intense. They are intense no matter what, but you are feeling them for the first time. And when you are feeling something new for the first time it is amazing and overwhelming. When you feel something intense the first time it is even more so. First crush, first love, and first heartache—those are special things that will be with you forever, so they are vivid and dramatic. It’s hard to remember that when you are going through them, but it’s all part of this whole growing up experience.”  
  
Hey. I guess that means we are each other’s first mature adult relationship on equal ground too, eh? So we have come full circle to beginnings, but how do I get Erica to climb a tree with me…  
  
Aliens, any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Or are you just entertained watching me on the hamster wheel?  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	82. If

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—If**_  
  
 **December 19, 2009**  
  
If I hadn’t met Callie, how would I have learned all of the things that I have learned? If I hadn’t met her, how would I have known I missed things? I’m so glad that I didn’t go through the things that Callie went through. I would have really hated it if I had been affected at school like that in addition to being affected personally by how the person I loved treated me—turned on me. It seems that the start that Callie and I had in Seattle just won’t be swept away by time. We discuss it when it comes up, but it is no longer a source of pain or misunderstanding. Instead it’s a place of growth and learning that discussing helps us to get closer. The thing is I was an adult going through that deep personal connection, both in college with Greg and then later with Callie. I was dedicated to my work and the pursuit of excellence on the way to becoming a doctor and on the way to becoming the best doctor I could be. I didn’t also have to be aware of all that while at the same time developing so much inside my own body and mind. Puberty, sigh, what a time. I may have been clueless, but I think I like it better that way. I didn’t have to worry about Pretty and Prettier in high school because I didn’t see them and they didn’t bother me.  
  
If I hadn’t met Callie then who would have dragged me today into the top of the playground and kissed me with reckless abandon? Who would have dragged me from that seaside park down to the pier and made me make Sand Angels since we couldn’t make Snow Angels. If not for Callie, then who else would have taken my picture laying there in the sand grumbling at how silly it was? Who would I have grabbed and pulled down with a shriek to kiss and roll in the sand with? Callie pulled me up when the moment was over, didn’t let me shake the sand off, and dragged me for margaritas at the end of the pier and a kiss in public under the mistletoe. Who else would have done all of that just to make me experience things she thought it would be nice if I could experience?  
  
If it wasn’t for Callie, then I wouldn’t have been out Christmas shopping in the height of all the mayhem. I suppose you can’t have everything. Callie had a lot of what many people would call ‘typical growing up’ experiences. I somehow missed many of these experiences. Yet we both ended up in what she calls ‘high school with scalpels’ and learning just as much from each other despite our various lacks in experience or expertise.   
  
I have to say that finding our way in the dark together is really the best way to do it. Together we have all the tools we need. Callie wouldn’t think to bring a lantern to go through the dark path, but I would. I wouldn’t think to bring a blanket and beer, but Callie would know that when we got to the light, we’d want to celebrate. Callie would bring a rain jacket, but only one and share it with me if I got cold. I would think to bring two umbrellas, but it would sunshine and Callie would just smile at me.  
  
If I had to go holiday shopping in the height of the season then I’m glad that Callie was there to distract me when I was getting too grumbly. Tomorrow is another day and if it’s anything like this one—well, I can’t wait.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	83. And

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—And**_  
  
 **January 19, 2010**  
  
Sometimes I awaken in the night. A noise, my phone, a dream, just random and I roll over awake. It often takes a moment to realize I am awake, which means I must have been asleep, right? It’s nice, since now when I wake up like that usually Erica is there. It’s Erica and I in the bed. I like being part of an And. That’s nice too.  
  
I snuggle closer to Erica if we’ve drifted in our sleep. She leans into my touch, but I wonder if she’s just defending her space in the bed. In all of my relationships thus far, I have been the unquestionable bed hog. Probably the reason that I purchased a king bed, for just little old me in my new apartment in Los Angeles. I should have realized that it was the same for Erica, but I guess I just thought that she wanted the luxury. She’s so orderly in her life that I assumed she was ‘orderly’ in her bed as well. I guess in Seattle I didn’t notice her equal or greater bed hogging ways since I was too focused on freaking out. We didn’t spend much of our time actually asleep either, so I probably just slept like a log and didn’t notice. And when you are wrapped around someone like we were then, I guess you couldn’t call it being a bed hog. Time with someone allows you to notice things. That’s new and it’s nice. Except when Erica rolls and takes the blanket with her and I end up with a cold butt. Or when she rolls onto her back and her arm slaps me in the head…  
  
I just keep getting hit by that And. Erica is a heart surgeon and a bed hog. She is hard working and hard to wake up. She is early morning and get things done. She is meat and potatoes. And she’s perfect.   
  
It’s been four months since we got back together. When am I going to stop being surprised that we did? Or is that a good thing so that I always remember? You know so that neither of us take things for granted or forget what we could lose and how awful that was. I don’t want to always be on the edge of my seat that we had a false start in Seattle, but I don’t want to lose sight of how fragile a relationship can be—even one that’s on much more solid footing than we were, and that’s based on love. Oh, I gave myself the shivers. Love. I love Erica Hahn. Callie and Erica. C.T. + E. H. .   
  
It’s odd I suppose that Erica and I haven’t said that to each other. I know she loves me and I think it’s pretty clear that I love her. We act like the shmoopy couple that you see in old movies or something. I feel like I’ve already said it to her, but I know I haven’t. I wonder if she feels the same way.  
  
Erica and Callie. Hmmm. How nice to be a part of an And?   
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	84. He

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—He**_  
  
 **January 30, 2010**  
  
Going on a date with someone you’ve been practically living with is nice. Taking a break from routine and doing something different is exciting. Friday Night Date Night might be so cliché, but not everyone can whisk their girlfriend off to Santa Barbara. I guess cliché is different for each demographic. Although there’s nothing wrong with standing outside of a Baskin Robbins waiting for a movie to start with the local high schoolers and a few of the older demographic chaperoning the younger reluctant to be seen teens. I do like a mint chip shake after all and Callie is so adorable with a bit of chocolate on her bottom lip. And as Callie likes to point out, I seem to have missed a bunch of these experiences growing up the way that I did, so it’s nice to tick them off some list somewhere, I suppose.  
  
Yelp has become my new best friend. What I may lack in romanticism and local knowledge, they more than make up for in reviews and ratings. The hotel was close to the beach, which was pretty despite the cold temperatures in January. I’m not sure if it’s because we were in Seattle for so many years, but we both seem to have an affinity for being near the water. I live inland in Los Angeles, but made the trip down to the water to jog or just enjoy at least a couple of times a week. Callie moved right down to the beach. Watching the waves from her balcony has become one of my favorite things to do in LA. This little get away was overall fantastic. The drive north wasn’t too bad since we were able to leave early and miss most of the traffic. The dinner was good and the hotel quite nice. With bed hogging being an issue for both of us, it was nice to have a bed that was not only comfortable but just as large as the one at home. Today we went down to the beach for a walk, cruised around the State Street area popping into shops, and then drove over to the zoo. Callie is a sucker for animals and there were a few additions in the form of babies that really perked her up.  
  
So many great things in such a short space of time, and yet I have to complain.  
  
At the restaurant last night we were enjoying a lovely meal, until a charming over-confident member of the wait staff came over to talk to us and flirt. He was tall, knew he was good looking, spoke French, and I think his eyes actually sparkled when he made his little jokes. All in all it reminded me of Mark Sloan. Personality, if not looks, he was from the same stock for sure. I couldn’t wait for him to leave the table. I almost let it throw me off for the whole night, but then Callie made a joke and snorted at herself and I just couldn’t stay in a funk. He was equally over friendly to the both of us and he did have some interesting bits to tell us about the restaurant and the area. I have to admit that he was quite charming with his French and willingness to practice with us on a few phrases. I would probably have liked him just fine if I hadn’t met him while on a date with Callie.  
  
This leaves me in a strange place of wonder. Will I forever tense when an attractive man comes anywhere near us? Can I truly trace this back to Mark Sloan and Callie’s involvement in Seattle? Am I paranoid that Callie isn’t as into girls?   
  
I don’t know which question I dislike more—the potential permanent jealousy of a Mark Sloan individual or the lesbian worried that their lover will leave them for a man.   
  
In the back of my brain do I not trust Callie even after all this time? And yet my dislike wasn’t really about being worried about the man and Callie or Callie’s response to him. I just wanted to have my evening as much about the two of us as possible. Maybe after a long week, I was just weary of people and wanting my girl to myself? I can hope that’s the case, because if it’s any of those other things then I really need to sit down and do a lot of thinking about what Callie and I are to each other.  
  
We spend so much time together and talk about everything. In Seattle we spent a lot of time together, but it just wasn’t like this. I think working at two separate places is nice too, since we have similar, but different people to be happy or upset about. I feel like Callie and I have come so far and have a relationship based on love and respect. And this time I think we have it in the right balance too. I feel like we have been together a lot longer than we actually have been in many respects. It’s strange I know that we love each other, but we haven’t said it. I don’t feel bad about it either. It’s not like I’m holding back for anything and I don’t feel like Callie loves me any less. I think it’s just where we are right now. I guess our false start just makes me extra reflective when I have a bad reaction something like when that guy approached our table Friday night. I guess he doesn’t have to be specific to old issues or even indicative of a current issue, maybe he is just a reminder to me to pay attention to Callie and what we have together.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	85. She

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—She**_  
  
 **February 10, 2010**  
  
When did I become the responsible one? I’m not a morning person. No way. There’s not enough caffeine on the planet to make me a morning person. If someone could find that drug, then they would be as rich as the folks who invented Viagra and Post Its. I’m sure. Anyway. Maybe I should switch career paths? I wonder if it’s too late. Hmm.  
  
Being at two different hospitals, our schedules don’t always match and when they don’t somehow I’m the one hitting snooze on the radio alarm and nudging Erica into gentle wakefulness. I love kissing her shoulder and rubbing against her skin while she groans about the loss of her blanket and hugs the pillow closer to her body. She hits snooze on her phone alarm. When the alarm radio comes on again I don’t bother to turn it off. Erica has found the most eccentric radio program. It plays a strange mixture of oldies and new stuff. I don’t like the morning radio—too much talking, but my reward is when she turns to me, faking sudden wakefulness and sings a line here and there before kissing me soundly on the mouth. It is ridiculously cute that she then lays back down trying to reach for sleep again. It should be irritating since I’m trying to help her get going, but it’s utterly adorable.  
  
She is everything to me; despite her obvious faults—AND MINE. She just is. She is all things sunshine and storm. Her blonde hair is the gold of a sunbeam through a window or the flash of a lightning bolt cracking through the sky. Her blue eyes are a tall drink of fresh water on a hot day and the darkened clouds of rain as they fall back to earth. She is the tenderness of a puppy’s skin against mine. She is also the gruff growl of a mama grizzly guarding her young.  
  
She is amazing and aggravating.  
  
And she is mine.  
  
Choosing something to put on in order to drive home and sleep some more I opened a drawer this morning. Without thinking about it, I opened a drawer in Erica’s dresser that I knew would have my clothes in it. I reached out, pulled on some clothes and then I sat with a thud against the bed. I stared at the dresser with the drawer half open thinking, “I have a drawer here.”  
  
Erica found me that way and wrapped in her towel and dripping water she pulled me up into her arms. Her eyes dark with worry she asked if I was okay and frantically looked me over. I shook my head and looked right back into her eyes smiling hard. My face hurt with how big I was smiling. Erica smiled back but her blue eyes still searched mine.  
  
“I love you.”  
  
I just blurted it out.  
  
“Oh, I love you.”  
  
I pounced her, but she tackled me. The bed squeaked and Erica—Dr. Erica Hahn—was late for work.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	86. Choices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Choices**_  
  
 **February 16, 2010**  
  
We all make choices. Good choices, bad choices, indifferent choices—no matter what they are we have to live with them for better or worse. Most choices don’t matter so much—toilet paper, how long to brush our teeth at any given moment, or which color socks to wear on any given day. Some choices have long lasting ripple effects that they can’t seem to shake, or that they can only shake after hard work or serious soul searching. When we need forgiveness or have to take our pride down a notch, it can be a difficult road back to center. Sometimes center doesn’t even look the same when we get back to it. The center shifts and changes as our divergent paths are followed and impacted.  
  
Some things in life are not choices. I didn’t choose Callie. I chose a job at that hospital. I chose to find out my feelings for her. I chose to walk away. However I didn’t choose her. She was going to be in my life from the moment that I saw her flash that perfect smile. I didn’t even know who she was then. I was in for a surgery and to mock Burke. I saw her and didn’t even know my life had changed. I didn’t choose a lot of this. I have chosen to get to know Callie. I have chosen to get past our difficulties. I have chosen to grow myself, to become the person that is worthy of the opportunity life felt I needed.   
  
A few days ago Callie and I passed another milestone. I was showering after getting up late… because it was a late night. I love Callie, but we really need to find a way to keep our hands off each other. I came out and thought she was in trouble. Maybe an early morning phone call that had disturbed her or something. She was dressed and didn’t seem injured except for that look on her face and the way she was half sitting on the bed. Her drawer was hanging open, which I hate because I will eventually take out my shin on it. I really can’t complain though. I pulled her into my arms to check on her and she said she loved me. Of course, I reciprocated and then I was late to work, but it was worth it.  
  
I may not have chosen Callie, but I choose to keep Callie. I choose to give everything in my heart. I have made many choices in my life, but this might just be the most important one. This might be the choice that all of my other choices were leading me towards and I just didn’t know it.  
  
Yesterday we were at Callie’s and she was in her bedroom for way too long. I turned the dinner down to low on the stove so that it wouldn’t be a lost burnt cause. When I went into her room she was throwing things around and had all the dresser drawers open. I thought she had just gone to the bathroom, but apparently she had gone to have one of her famous fast-talking overwhelmed Callie freak-outs. She really is just the most adorable person in the world. Apparently she realized on her way to the bathroom that I didn’t have a drawer at her house like she had at mine. That had to be rectified immediately, I can only guess from her reaction. After some talking I went out to my car and grabbed a sweatshirt that has been in the trunk since the last rain in the spring. It didn’t smell great and wasn’t clean when I stashed it there, but it was something of mine that I could leave at her house. I didn’t even have a sock I could have left there—sandals, capris, and a t-shirt. I made her promise to wash it and that I promise to bring an extra pair of clothes the next time we are at her house.  
  
I love that woman. So, so much.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	87. Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Life**_  
  
 **March 24, 2010**  
  
Life is a highway, a box of chocolates, or a journey. I suppose it’s anything that you want to call it, if you explain why. That’s always what we are in search of, right? The why. I guess that whole river thing makes the most sense as you watch the path that water takes—the path of least resistance as it carves a canyon, or the curve it forms around a boulder, or the jump it makes when it runs out of surface. Still waters run deep and all of that. We still always want to trace the why. Why does water flow at all? Where is it always going? Why does it rush against the shore like that day in and day out?  
  
No matter what—life is amazing. Even if we have to wonder if aliens interfere and play games in our lives or take people away to amazing lesbian boot camp places.   
  
I played with Arizona, who taught me quite a few tricks. We were all about playing games, having a good time, and distracting each other. Discussing toys was almost as hot as reading stories about them and shopping for them online, which was almost as fun as going to a shop together. However none of those things were as much fun as taking those toys home and trying them out.   
  
Once I got going on the path to healthier relationships, or just relationships that wouldn’t destroy me like in high school, then you could never call me shy or inhibited about sex. However sex with boys, usually in a hurry and focused on how good the guy thought he was didn’t really focus on what kind of other fun could be had with the body. I’m sure that some boys eventually get around to a certain amount of experimentation. Mark probably could have. Maybe just not in their early twenties.  
  
Better late than never, right? Mid-thirties is a good time to begin playing games. You can truly understand what it means to trust someone on multiple levels, to recover from when they don’t live up to being the partner they said they were going to be, and to really accept chances for the opportunities that they are and not let go.  
  
Erica? As usual that over achiever did everything she could think of and a little bit more. Or at least she researched it and committed it to that big brain of hers. Or maybe she really did get kidnapped by aliens and taken to a lesbian sex boot camp planet. Maybe.   
  
From everything she has ever told me about Neva, I don’t think it was all things between them. She’s a little non-committal when I ask her about the details, and to tell the truth I’d rather think of some kind of sexy alien tutors/consorts than another human woman. Maybe that’s not fair since Erica knows my new knowledge comes from my time with Arizona. Erica seems to accept that with more grace than I do. Maybe it’s because I watched the occasional episode of Star Trek Voyager and there were some pretty sexy aliens on there.  
  
In any case, like most things in life, we want to ask why, but maybe we should just accept the magnificent glory of the situation. It was a little hard to shut off my non-stop interior monologue, but with my wrists in silk scarves, my nipples caged in delicious pressured clamps connected by a chain, and Erica Hahn sliding into me with a blue strap-on as she told me things that made me blush and pulled the chain of my nipples until I came with a roar… Well. I don't so much need an answer as I need 1. an opportunity to try it also, and 2. an encore performance.  
  
Holy smokes, Aliens. You have really and truly out done yourselves this time.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	88. School

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—School**_  
  
 **March 25, 2010**  
  
I think I finally did it. I made Callie speechless. I didn’t mean to. She had a few questions and I had a few answers that she seemed to really like but also be shocked by. I can’t help it if we have both lived separate lives during the time when we were apart, and I can’t help it if I’m a voracious reader and researcher. When I have a new topic of interest I just file pieces of information away for later use. This is the United States after all—sex is referenced in just about everything. It is also the information age or whatever—you can research as easily as you can turn on your computer.  
  
Maybe it was the combination of everything? The sweaty snugglebunies afterward where we clung breathlessly to each other and pulled a sheet over to cover us was the same as before. I just wanted to make our six month anniversary special and I knew she’d like to pull against those silk scarves while I pulled the chain taunting her nipples. I just knew it. And if her reaction was anything to go by, I’ll love it too.  
  
Once she had recovered a little and could pull away to look in my eyes, she asked me if I had been kidnapped by aliens and taken to a sex boot camp of some kind. I just stared at her—hoping that I hadn’t somehow jarred a psychotic break or something. I thought I had researched everything. You know don’t tie scarves too tight, or leave the person tied for too long, but maybe I missed the fine print about breaks with reality post coitus? Her amazing smile and lunatic laughter didn’t do much to soothe my fears, but when she rolled on top of me and began telling me how amazing I was with her words, her hands, and her mouth… Well, I got lost in her search for what makes me tick and left the search for her sanity for later.   
  
This morning she made me toast and coffee and let me know in no uncertain terms that we would be revisiting those ‘tricks.’ I about pulled her into bed again with me when her voice dropped low over the word tricks. The image of Callie with those black leather straps holding that blue dildo against her tanned skin and hovering over me as she tied my willing wrists and prepared my nipples with her mouth… Well. I wondered if the aliens hadn’t done something to my brain after all.  
  
The weekend starts tomorrow and I think that Callie is going to have a few more questions that I’ll be happy to answer. Ha ha. Lesbian sex planet indeed. I think that might be worth researching. Maybe it’s a bed time story that Callie would enjoy—something about Pleasure Academy on Planet Zuton where the girls have green skin and are called Sancours. I can tell her all about the various pleasures of the flesh and mind that they taught me at the school. Hmmm. Callie would look good in one of those school uniforms. Maybe if I’ll play Mistress of the Pleasure Academy, then she’d play the willing school girl…  
  
Tomorrow is another day and I cannot wait!  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	89. Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Work**_  
  
 **April 23, 2010**  
  
Last week Erica and I went up to Malibu. We were lucky that the rain cleared up for a bit and it wasn’t flooding or anything. In retrospect that’s probably why we grabbed a hotel, instead of trying to camp. Growing up I always thought of Malibu as the beachy town where all the celebrities lived. It had winding roads to add to the mystique and there was always something dramatic going on there with all those stars—it was threatened by fire, or nearly being washed away in an El Nino. It sort of became part of my understanding of California or Hollywood or something—somehow mixed in with movies over the years and news reports about celebrities. Kind of like I think New York is just part of everything too, but I didn’t really understand the reality until I went there myself and saw it. I’m sure too, that a New Yorker would tell me that I still don’t know much about it. Perhaps even New Yorkers and Los Angelinos (?) don’t even know the full mystery of their cities. They are such large places with so many hidden corners and pockets of people. Beverly Hills folks probably don’t understand anymore about East LA than people from the heart of Manhattan understand about Harlem. The experiences are just too different I guess.  
  
Really that could be said of anywhere. I mean my experience of Seattle was different than Erica’s, which was in turn different from each of Meredith Grey’s crowd, which was way different than Finn’s experience. Funny that I realize how different our experiences were and that’s just within the people that I know. I guess that our work really effects our place in the world. Not that it puts us down or whatever, because people can be anything they want to be, and even re-invent themselves later in life. Although we interact with the world the way we have to. Finn’s interaction with animals and families in a small practice was so different to the interactions that were going on with Meredith’s little group at a big hospital.  
  
I don’t know how I got on to that except that I was thinking about work and different points of view. Malibu to me was one set of concepts gleaned from the news, movies, and my own fanciful imagination. I was so thrilled when Erica took me to Malibu Canyon and we went hiking. She showed me that Malibu is not just the images I had in my head. Although she did work it back to Hollywood in case I complained by saying that they filmed the tv show MASH in the canyon. I guess in Southern California you are truly never very far from the influence of Hollywood, even it’s it a dirt trail along an oak lined canyon. I was amazed that Erica had shown me something new and that she would even have known that Hollywood link. I love that she always surprises me.  
  
A trail runner passed us with a hydration pack and skimpy running clothes. We fought back our comments questioning the sanity of trail running and doing it alone in a remote canyon until he was out of sight. We stopped for lunch and then began our way back. Erica was a little disappointed that we hadn’t found the more obvious sights from the tv show, but said there was always next time. Our trail runner made it safely back as he shouted that he was on the left so we could move over. Again we kept back our criticisms of the advisability of solo running like that until he was gone. Unfortunately, the wisdom of our concerns was proven correct when we were probably about halfway back to the canyon parking spaces. Luckily the runner’s fall had not actually injured his legs or his head/neck. Instead more mortifyingly he broke his fall with his arm and thus broke his arm. In tv shows, they always show someone having a heart attack or choking, so it was nice to deal with a nice issue that didn’t mean Erica was the automatic hero.  
  
Who knew that Erica had taken a situation improvisation seminar? I may have been the ortho doctor calming our new patient, but it has to be said that Erica was the one to find all the supplies we would need in order to create an immobilizing sling.  
  
I’m beginning to think that Erica is like the MacGuyver of everything. Maybe the aliens kidnapped her and she’s the one that taught them stuff and not the other way around? Who else would choose a very blue dildo? An alien teacher. Most people go and like teach in Japan or build houses in Mexico… No, Erica went to Planet Zuton and taught advanced sexology at the Pleasure Academy after she got their wildnerness medical unit up and running.  
  
I was thinking how nice it was to love my work. I was able to help that guy. Well, we were. It’s funny I always thought my teachers or family were a little goofy for talking about the work they do in their lives and asking me what ‘work’ I wanted to do with mine. I was really good with science mostly. It wasn’t until later that I wanted to use science to help people. Really, it wasn’t until the last couple of years seeing what this work could be and what it shouldn’t be—that I finally get it. I am doing my thing, but I am involved in the work of helping people, making lives longer, getting more out of life, and overall changing the world one sprained finger, hip replacement, and dislocated shoulder at a time.  
  
Of course, when I was thinking of Erica’s expertise, I got distracted. I admit it. She’s amazing. Maybe she’ll tell me the story of the Zuton Mobile Medical Unit tonight. Fans self. She told me some amazing stories about the alien planet Zuton and the girls there. Oh my. She should be home soon, too. Hmmm.  
  
Hey. I said home. Yay.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	90. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Number freaking 90!!!!!! Nine zero, bb. Grey’s Anatomy. Callie/Erica. 090. Home. Title: Diary of Dysfunction Fandom: Grey’s Anatomy Characters: Callie, Erica, general cast, OC Prompt: 090. Home. Word Count: 703 Rating: PG Summary: Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica Author’s Notes: No spoilers. Erica already left the show so this is AU.
> 
> Haha. That was the original post note and I giggled when I saw it and so I transferred it over as well. ;)

_**Fanfic 100—Home**_  
  
 **April 30, 2010**  
  
Callie said to wait for her at home.  
  
It’s Alan’s going away party or whatever and they are all going for dinner and drinks at their version of Joe’s, or maybe it’s more like a restaurant than that. In any case, it’s their regular hangout. I’m not sure if it’s just their group that goes there, or if it’s a hospital wide gathering place. I guess that was the benefit/drawback to Joe’s—everyone from Seattle Grace went there whether they should or not and regardless of what they would be up to once they had been there for a few hours or imbibing… I love that we work across town from each other or rather across the urban sprawl that it the San Fernando Valley. Even if her hospital and mine only had one bar—we are far enough apart that they wouldn’t be the same bar filled with the same people weaving the same webs of interactions, rumors, and general silliness of people that work too hard for too many hours together. I miss seeing Callie in the hall on a long day or sharing a quite lunch in the attendings’ lounge or even the tables outside on a quiet afternoon. However I can’t possibly be any happier that I don’t need to know her work gossip or think that I’m part of it. Or that I might have to go see Callie and run into her roommate, who is also my student…  
  
I’m pleased about that, but as I sit here on Callie’s couch looking out at the dark horizon of the ocean wrapped in a towel fresh from the shower… I’m even more pleased about how she called it home. She’s done that a couple of times recently in reference to wherever we are going to be—it’s not just her place that’s home or my place. We used to say that, because we had to for clarity. There’s been a shift in the last couple of weeks though. I like it. I like that we aren’t rushing and forcing things ahead of where they are and yet at the same time we are meeting each new step in our evolution head on and together.  
  
I think in many ways Callie almost blurts things out or acts on what she’s feeling and then back tracks to process as she realizes what’s going on. I mean the drawer at my house for example, followed by the realization and our big I love you morning, which was followed by the need to make sure it was equally demonstrated by a drawer at my house. I guess that’s where this idea of home is coming from. She’s just started saying it, while I’ve started to think about it and realize it. I wonder about where we would make a home. I can see our things combined and the inside of living together in my mind. We should be together and I can see it so vividly. However when I begin to think about which residence or buying something new… together. Then I start to wonder. Are we rushing? We’ve only been together for 7 months. Or really we’ve been together almost two years, except that like a military person I was off on Planet Zuton on a humanitarian mission… It doesn’t feel like we are rushing. I guess it’s a big step just like coming out to ourselves and then everyone else was a big step.  
  
I want Callie to come home. I want to hold her and begin to talk to her about our future home. I want home not to be wherever we are, but really our home—one place where we both always go back to. I can see the inside of it. That’s what matters right? The outside is just so many details. Like the relationship between us should have been about the two of us and not everyone else. We got past that and found the inside—each other—so we can do that again. I think if we both build the idea of home together that we can make it a reality.  
  
Tomorrow is another day and once again I can’t wait to share it with Callie.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	91. Birthday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Birthday**_  
  
  
 **May 18, 2010**  
  
Two years ago I walked out of the longest day of my life (at least up to that point, other longer days came later, but I didn’t know that at the time. I had been really close to Erica, Addison had smacked me on the head with realization that I didn’t want, and Mark had shoved me in her direction in his own dirty way. Those kids dealing with Cement Boy and that girl who liked him… It all was connected and painful and I didn’t want to have anything to do with any of it.  
  
Walking out of the hospital that night I just wanted to get drunk with Mark and let it all go. I wanted to lose myself in the bottom of another long neck bottle and let Mark play my body like the finely tuned instrument that it is.  
  
Then I saw Erica. You could tell she had a bad day and was a mess because she never, ever stopped outside the hospital and she never dug and dug in her bag looking for anything. No, Dr. Erica Hahn had her keys in her hand, her head held high, and she didn’t stop for anything short of a page from the Chief. Mark saw her too and he knew. He heard my gasp of breath and laughed when my feet stopped, so I could watch this rare and beautiful creature. He pushed me forward towards my destiny.  
  
Oh, yuck. I hope he never sees this. All sappy? I must be PMS or something.  
  
Her hair was a mess, she didn’t answer when I called her, and even when she did look at me her eyes were glazed over. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t say what I thought I needed to say. I couldn’t hide behind my fears anymore. Really and truly, I could only step forward, look at her eyes, her lips, and kiss her like she was my lifeline.  
  
Unfortunately, we weren’t ready for each other—it was our birthday and we came out kicking and screaming to the world, but we weren’t prepared for it or each other. Like so many births in the world, it was a difficult one. That long day that started it all, well it was certainly not the longest by any stretch of imagination. But I got through. With a little help from my friends. Oh god, there I go again.  
  
Maybe I should think that Erica and I are like the Phoenix, instead of just regular old traumatic birthdays. Maybe we just had to go through the fire, so we could rise again.  
  
Birthday, anniversary, or whatever. I’m glad that we rose from the ashes of our wreckage to find each other again.  
  
Erica has been looking at me in a way I can’t quite understand. It’s like she’s seeing me for the first time all over again. It’s nice, but I’m not sure what she’s thinking when she has that look. I wonder if it was the same look that I was giving her that night when I just kissed her. Later she told me that I looked like I was going to devour her. I do love it when Erica devours me. Hmmmmm. I sure hope that I’m not PMS. Erica will be home soon.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	92. Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Christmas**_  
  
 **May 28, 2010**  
  
Callie said yes.  
  
I asked her to move in and she lit up like a kid at Christmas. I thought that she might take us over the back of the couch with her exuberance. I don’t know. We already had keys to each other’s houses. It wasn’t much of a stretch I suppose, but I guess it was like the drawers and the ‘I love yous’. We may have already crossed that threshold, but there is something wonderful about actually articulating each step.  
  
I can’t believe how long it’s been. Callie confirmed I was asking her on a ‘date, date’ such a long time ago. So much has happened in the intervening time, but we are both happy with our jobs and happy with ourselves. When we first met we were certainly not either. I have no idea what possessed me to sign on at Seattle Grace. Callie jokes that I saw her the previous year and subconsciously was trying to get closer to her even then. It’s a fun game to play, so I go along—kind of like the Sex Goddess of Zuton game that we play. Now… that’s fun. Hmmm.  
  
We haven’t talked about particulars, but we have discussed a little bit about the virtues of each of our places and the advisability of moving somewhere that we buy together. I can just imagine it now—sitting in the real estate office signing and signing and signing. Then again, I can imagine Callie’s unique enthusiasm… Hmmm.  
  
Callie celebrating in a naked room, naked herself. In every room of the new place. Maybe we should buy a mansion… I understand the attraction now. Malibu wouldn’t be the worst commute ever… Is that why celebs move houses often? So they can enjoy the naked possibility of each new house as they move from place to place?  
  
Callie celebrating the move in unpacking a special box… In our new place maybe we need a larger cupboard to place all those treasures big and small. Maybe Callie is right? Maybe I was brainwashed by aliens. I seem to think about sex more and more and more the longer I know her. As long as I never get enough of her and keep working at a different hospital, I think that I can handle thinking about Callie and things to share with her.  
  
Callie claiming drawers in our bedroom and more than her share of the bed. Callie sleeping next to me every single day possible. Knowing that when we need space we can get it, but not have to go very far. Being able to reach out and touch Callie after such a long time of figuring things out.  
  
The summer is upon us and by winter we will be together. Warm fuzzy socks, fleece blankets on the couch and each other—I can’t wait for those days to come. I have not felt this level of hope since the first time that Callie kissed me. This time I feel that I do not have to hide this hope away in the basement and avoid Callie. This time I feel like I can carry my hope on my arm like a shield and proudly face the future we have ahead of us.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	93. Thanksgiving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Thanksgiving**_  
  
 _ **June 18, 2010**_  
  
Last night we had a dinner party at my place. Erica is so cute. To decide where we should live, Erica has decided that we should conduct an experiment. We have been doing a week at my place and a week at Erica’s to see how we truly like the commute and the location. Los Angeles meant different things to us and attracted us in unique ways. We each chose where we live based on a few reasons, but know that we will have to compromise when we merge. Ooooh. Merge. I like that. It sounds nice. I wonder if they Merge on Planet Zuton. Oooh. I have the shivers. I like that Erica’s underwear drawer will be next to mine. Is that silly? I like that she usually goes to work earlier than I do and I can steal her pillow while she’s in the shower. Is it sane to be this happy?  
  
I know that Erica likes living closer to Cedars, but I live closer to our friends—both mine and hers. I do so love the water. It makes even the worst day a little better. That might be the ultimate reason for my choosing to live here. Then again it might be tied with the fact that Addison lives over here too. How could I not like that, eh? And they seem to get along. Erica’s friends, Natasha and Gabriel are amazing. A little older, but I suppose after her tour of duty in the rather juvenile halls of SGH, that it makes total sense to find a nice settled slightly older married couple to be friends with. No Meredith Grey concerns, stolen hearts, or even the more recent pull of a friend turned lover like Neva. I still find it amazing and odd that Erica has friends, since she was so restrained and closed off at SGH. I guess it’s a testament to the kind of soul searching she has gone through.  
  
I wonder what the testament to my reflections is? What does Erica see that shows I have changed?  
  
I guess that I broke away from the nest at SGH and I have grown as a doctor. I am a successful Attending at a major hospital. I haven’t rushed into anything with us, although I haven’t been shy either. I didn’t run away at any point of this. I didn’t go hide and do ‘research’ and I most certainly didn’t go test any kind of sex hypothesis with Mark.  
  
I guess that’s it. I know who I am. I know I like Erica and I am certain of it. I know that this isn’t a mistake. I’m doing the job I love and spending my life with the woman I love. How great is that?  
  
I made chicken enchiladas for dinner and Erica made some kind of fruit torte. It wasn’t flan, but it was delicious. Addison brought wine and Natasha and Gabriel had the most exquisite salad for us to start with. Good food, good friends, sharing a life with m love—sigh. I think this must be more sappy than my last entry, but that’s okay. I want to shout how wonderful my life is from the rooftops. I wonder about that phrase. I mean it would be pretty useless I think in Los Angeles, right? Maybe Zuton…  
  
Anyway. Dinner last night—it was a Thanksgiving.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	94. Independence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Independence**_  
  
 _ **June 27, 2010**_  
  
My house this week. Really both houses are ‘our’ houses now. It’s so strange. How saying ‘move in’ changes the same reality you’ve had every day for months. I mean we’ve been staying at each other’s house pretty much every night for months now, but somehow knowing that we are moving forward changed everything.  
  
It’s like kissing Callie—only different. We kissed and it changed everything, but it shouldn’t have changed anything really. We were already together. At the time we may not have known it, or we may not have been ready to admit it. However watching Callie walk out the door of Joe’s that night when Addison was there… That was definitely like I was watching my girlfriend walk out the door to go cheat. We may not have been together, but it was all there. The special comments just between us. The physical closeness. The time spent together both at work and away from it. That’s what Addison saw after all. She saw us as a couple. Kissing should have only solidified that like asking Callie to live with me has solidified our relationship. Instead it set off a horrible chain reaction in the both of us fueled thickly by denial, stubbornness and immaturity—on both of our parts.  
  
I think we needed some independence to recover from each other. To recover from ourselves. I needed to balance my work life with who I was becoming as a person. Callie needed to grow into the beautiful, powerful woman that she has become. At work she will only continue to grow, like I have, but she has finally reached full fledged status. She’s not an intern or a resident any more. Now she needs to work within her department, collaborate, and pioneer within her field—not prove that she can work a full shift or do a certain stitch. I needed to not let hurt from past pass judgment on people in my present. They can fuck up on their own perhaps, but I have to let them prove themselves one way or the other. Otherwise I’m just going to create self-fulfilling prophecies one after another. In the past year I have seen what people can mean to each other and that the connections are worth fighting for and hanging onto.  
  
We may have needed independence and a shot of growing up, but now I think I am ready to say goodbye to that. I can feel it as we get ready to ‘move’ back to Callie’s house for the week. It is a place. It has been mine for a time, but it is only so many walls and rooms for my things. Callie’s house doesn’t feel like our eventual home. Perhaps because we have already said that we want to find a new place. We have also said that we will have more than one tv in the house. I can’t believe how into sports Callie is. It’s a little much. Shouting at the tv. Wearing sports jerseys. Hot wings? What is the point of that food? Callie has to take tums if it’s a really close game.  
  
I get to watch my Syfy and all that…  
  
Hmm. Then again. Callie all wound up is really fun to play with. You know with all my Zuton Sextress skills. Ha ha.  
  
Oh my god. She has me doing it—talking about aliens. I guess I should just start rooting for the team now. What season is it? I hope she doesn’t root for any Seattle teams after all that we went through getting away from there.  
  
—Erica  
  


 

 

 


	95. New Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—New Year**_  
  
 **July 2, 2010**  
  
I was finally cleaning the Rover and found one of my old music CDs. It’s funny how we remember and forget things. Some things fade away quickly, but can be recalled instantly with the right reminder. Other things are lost forever from our minds. Most of it doesn’t matter in the end—what time you get up on any given day, or what pair of panties you chose from the drawer, or what tv program you watched. Other things never seem to fade from our memories, or are never faraway. For me music is like that. I always forget about Pink, Tegan & Sara and Owl City. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget about Lady Gaga… Hah!!! Like that could ever happen. Then there’s the beats Ke$ha, Black Eyed Peas, and Jay-Z. I always gotta have dance beats, but I don’t always know who’s who. I just know what moves me. Like Christina Aguilera and David Guetta. Sigh.  
  
I wonder if the aliens taught Erica to dance? She was doing pretty good when we were hanging out all the time, but when we tried to go a couple of months ago… It was clear that she was out of practice. I think that the aliens should beam her up for a weekend refresher course. Hmm. Then again, it was a lot of fun teaching her the first time. Maybe with some tequila and the right music mix, we can lubricate the muscle memory. Or we could always end up in bed instead. Did Mark just take over my brain, or what?  
  
A year ago I was just getting in touch with Erica again. I was glad that it seemed like we had both grown into who we needed to be. I was taking stock of my new life and reflecting on the fact that people underestimate themselves and don’t see what is right in front of them.  
  
It feels good to listen to one of my old mixes and enjoy the music all over again, while at the same time taking stock once more about life and realizing that I have come so far. I don’t underestimate myself. I think I’m in a better work environment and truly thriving. (Now I better not let Mark see that sappiness!). I see Erica and can’t get enough of her—I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of her.  
  
And going back to the whole remembering things… My algebra teacher in junior high was a little bizarre, but he of course did teach me things that have stayed with me—like solving for x and all that. Anyway. He used to say that, ‘today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ I guess in that way every time I take a moment to look around and take stock of all that life has to offer, then I am starting a new day, a new year, and indeed the rest of my life. I think I should bookmark this page and last year’s too. Then I should put a little note in the CD case for each time I find it again in Renee (my Rover!).  
  
Ok, aliens. My clean car and I are off to pick up Erica so we can go to Las Vegas. I think that they have dancing, tequila, and beds. Soft, fluffy, big, big, big beds… Oh yes. As Pink would say, “Raise your glass!”  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	96. Writer's Choice-#96-Boxes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Writer’s Choice**_  
  
_**July 31, 2010**_  
  
We found a place. Callie brought home boxes. Apparently the whole 90 days of escrow are completely immaterial to my dearest honeybunny. I think she was putting books in boxes. I suppose as long as she doesn’t pack the kitchen, my underwear and the toothbrushes—it’s all good. I could wear scrubs for the next two months I suppose and sleep naked. Now there’s an idea. Because I think that Callie would just be naked except for work. I hate to say it but I did listen occasionally to the random talk of the Grey gang when I was at SGH. Alex Karev loved teasing Callie about the time that the Chief caught her in the basement in her underwear dancing around. How classic would that be, eh? I wish I could have seen her face then. She’s so expressive. That being said I certainly wouldn’t trade that vision for even a second of my time with her now.  
  
She better not pack the TV either. Well. At least she better not pack my tv. I suppose that I can still retreat back to my place if Callie’s gets too boxy. How strange.  
  
Maybe Callie will take this opportunity to match all of her socks once again. Hee hee. That girl is sometimes quite the mess. But I wouldn’t have her any other way.  
  
A year ago I was contemplating the symbolic house of my relationship with Callie and pointing out how it was doomed despite all of our efforts to deny there were issues or avoid them. I was trying to decide if the life I had created independent of Callie was the real thing or just a detour while I found my way back to her. I was so confused, but I had to find out.  
  
I wrote this question down last year, “Does every step serve a purpose in our life no matter how painful, or how boring, or how adventurous?” I think that it does in some slightly twisted way. I think that there are certain places that you want to get to or get back to, like being with Callie, and you had to be doing something else that would make you ready to get to that place. I suppose, like math, there is often more than one way to solve a problem. There is more than one way to prepare a person for a life experience just so long as they are really ready when the time comes.  
  
I also wrote that, “Temporary homes are traded for permanent ones.” The circumstances last year were drastically different than they are now. I couldn’t tell if I was in a temporary home that should be made into a permanent one with my relationship with Neva or if I was in a temporary home that should be traded back out in order to follow the path I had started with Callie previously. Looking back this really resonates. I feel now that I truly am in a temporary home (an effect no doubt maximized by the sounds of Callie thumping around in the other room filling boxes too full…) and getting ready to trade this home for the one I was meant to find originally.  
  
Callie and I are going to live together.  
  
Callie is probably going to pack my underwear too early.  
  
Aliens, could you buy me a few weeks? I’d like to not have to buy underwear and hide them from Callie. I’d also like to have our offer accepted before we fill too many boxes up. Tomorrow is another day, aliens, and I really have to be able to find things in the drawers to get ready on time, not in boxes.  
  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	97. Writer's Choice-#97-Back to School

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Writer’s Choice**_  
  
**August 20, 2010**  
  
Apparently school resumed this week. Traffic patterns changed a bit. Yellow school buses were rumbling around the streets. Back to school specials were on at Target… My god. It looked like a war zone. Who knew you needed a flak jacket and SWAT support in order to get your glitter and glue sticks? No child left behind seems to take on another meaning when you apply the war zone lens and reexamine.  
  
I may have told Finn that SGH was just high school with scalpels, but I wasn’t thinking about that poor bombed out corner of target. Whoosh. If that isn’t birth control (watching school shopping) then I don’t know what is. Thank god for online shopping. If I ever need to go back to school—I solemnly promise myself to go Amazon instead of Target.  
  
It got me thinking about school again and memories good and bad. Mostly bad, but I’m now able to fast forward past them. I can focus on just the good times and just the things worth keeping around. Oh gosh. More sentimental crap. Maybe it’s all this cleaning? I found that CD in the Rover and now I’m thinking about yellow school buses…  
  
I flipped back to my first entry since I remembered that I wrote about one of my favorite teachers. And Samuel. And cattle rustlers. And first loves.  
  
Sigh.  
  
“These emotions are incredibly intense. They are intense no matter what, but you are feeling them for the first time. And when you are feeling something new for the first time it is amazing and overwhelming. When you feel something intense the first time it is even more so. First crush, first love, and first heart ache—those are special things that will be with you forever, so they are vivid and dramatic. It’s hard to remember that when you are going through them, but it’s all part of this whole growing up experience.”  
  
The emotions are incredibly intense. Every single time. How is that? Falling in love with Erica this time was just as intense as it was the first time and just as intense as I remember falling in love with Samuel way back when. I suppose that the first time aspect refers to the fact that you have never seen/felt it before and so the feelings eclipse everything else around them and nothing exists beyond them. After you’ve had a broken heart before and had to put the pieces back together… Well, I guess you know that if something goes wrong you can survive in the wilderness after.  
  
I wonder if falling in love with Erica is just as intense this second time because I know just how good it is and will be, and just how important she is to me. It is like falling with your eyes open and watching it all as it goes by.  
  
Hmmm. That sounds scary as hell. I now have a totally terrifying image of Alice falling and falling and falling and still seeing it all as she goes down to the bottom. That sounds freaky. It’s not like that with Erica. No freaky. Just sexy. And smart. And beautiful. And, and, and…  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


	98. Writer's Choice-#98--Commando

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

_**Fanfic 100—Writer’s Choice**_  
  
 **October 17, 2010**  
  
Callie has packed the kitchen. At both houses. She has packed the bathroom, the bedrooms, the various other things around such as books, doo-dads, CDs, DVDs… She has packed my shoes! The walls are bare of all art, notes, and photos. I cannot retreat to my place. Callie has become a contagion of box obsession.  
  
Our offer was accepted. Things are going well. There’s the usual runaround with paperwork or interest rates or whatever. So far its all been handled and Callie hasn’t flown off the handle at anyone. I suppose that would make for some excitement.  
  
Thankfully she has seen fit to not pack the couch or the television. Truthfully I haven’t been home enough to truly be bothered by it. I notice sure, but apparently everyone in the greater LA area has decided to have a heart issue or check up in the last two and a half months. It has been one patient after another coupled with emergencies and complications. I simply come home, fall asleep on the couch, and crawl into bed. If it wasn’t for needing to get dressed in the morning, I probably wouldn’t even notice that Callie has packed the houses up and we are living like fugitives.  
  
I keep thinking that I’ll wake up and find myself on a movie set instead of this being my life. Loving Callie is too good to be true, then again it’s pretty unbelievable to be living like a college student at the age of 43. Perhaps it’s not that the aliens kidnapped me, as Callie has so humorously shared. My new hypothesis is that the aliens kidnapped her and this is an impostor or perhaps they have possessed her in order to experience life on our planet. The most vivid sexual memory they could find after the brain probe included me, so the alien in charge has simply found its way to me in order to recapture that memory and expand its knowledge base.  
  
Oh my god. She has infected me. I better go check the back of my neck for an entrance wound…  
  
No. No way. I have seen every inch of Callie. And there’s no alien in evidence, except for the crazy that she sometimes says and does.  
  
If I was willing to move on Halloween, we could move a little earlier, but I just think that waiting till the weekend and not Halloween time when people just go a little more bonkers than usual would be good. Besides the hospital is always busy on any kind of occasion.  
  
My secret stash of underwear ran out yesterday. I had to go to work commando. I made it my mission to send Callie as many suggestive messages as I could all day long. I even told her that I was so hot for her that I wished she’d come to my hospital so that I could show her the on-call rooms… I was pounced when I got home and in the morning the bow with the undies was left open at the foot of the bed where I could trip on it, and find a fresh pair.  
  
I matched her socks the moment I had a free second and Callie was out getting Chinese take-out. Yeah. We don’t have any dishes out and Callie, for all her enthusiasm to pack, doesn’t seem to want to re-pack anything.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	99. Writer's Choice-#99-Shelf Paper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica

Fanfic 100—Writer’s Choice

November 13, 2010

Moving day!!! Stuff is everywhere. I love it. Small boxes, big boxes, trash from various moving supplies. We can see all the appliances that we had installed while we waited until the weekend to move. I feel like we have a skeleton that we added the organs to, and now we are adding the muscles and connective tissues. Once we get all moved in and art back up on the walls and details sorted out, then I think we’ll have the skin and other features that would flesh out the ‘person’ that is our house. Addison said that was gross and I shouldn’t think that way. I just laughed. She’s probably right, but I can’t help thinking that this time we are building our relationship piece by piece with a strong foundation under us. It would have been silly to pay rent on both places once we had put in the offer on this place, so we had decided what pieces of furniture we wanted in the new place between both our sets of furniture. The pieces that we didn’t want in the new house were moved to my place and then the last load for the moving truck was to the goodwill to get rid of the extra pieces.

Erica was thrilled to unpack her clothes and get the bedroom set up, so I left her in there and started to move the boxes off to their appropriate rooms. I had put everything from the kitchen boxes out on the various counters and our dining table when the phone rang. When Erica came in search of a snack she couldn’t help herself, but put things away. It was awesome.

Since we had movers and Addison wasn’t sure what to do, she put in the shelf paper. I wish she was there when I moved in with Christina. No one thought of it at first, and then later no one wanted to go to the trouble of putting it in after the fact. Addison could have been the shelf paper fairy. I would have even given her a little crown.

While I was on the phone in the living room, I unpacked boxes of CDs, DVDs and books. But I couldn’t really manage the lifting and balancing the phone, so I just set stuff in piles in front of the right shelf. Then I had to go in the office to get my calendar from my bag. I did the same thing while I was in there—opening the boxes and pulling things out. I put them near where they were gonna go, but I really just wanted to see what was in each box and have it all out.

By the time I hung up the phone, Erica had already put the living room things in their places more or less. I went and thanked her and her stomach growled. I offered to make dinner and she smiled at me. She wanted to have me for dessert. With a quick kiss I headed into the kitchen, which Erica had also seen to. I realized that all I had to do was put things out and in the way and she would put them in their places. I didn’t mean to be naughty, but it was perfect. I justified it by saying that I had packed most of it since Erica had been crazy busy from the moment we put our offer in with the realtor.

Well fed and clean, but exhausted we fell into bed together too tired to consummate our new castle. It might have just been the best night I’ve ever had.

And look at that, diary, this is the last page. So we come to the end of this book and the beginning of another. I can’t wait to get into the heart of our story together. So far it feels like we were messing around in the prequel and now that we are truly together and combined, now we can really start our story.

Thanks, Aliens.

—Callie


	100. Writer's Choice-#100-Whipped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Callie & Erica’s journals. Odds=Callie, Evens=Erica
> 
> And that's a wrap, folks. The uber-long road of the FF100 has finished. If you are new to this fic, let me just preface by saying that it covers a lot of territory, is written in a diary style from both POVs, and it covers a fair share of angst and working through shit. I really recommend reading only 25 or so at a time. If you do start at number 1 and slog through all the way, then I do offer this promise--it has a happy ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Irishhusky and Wimberg, you were awesome cheerleaders on the original road for this project :)

_**Fanfic 100—Writer’s Choice**_  
  
**November 14, 2010**  
  
My girlfriend is such a sneak. She went around emptying boxes last night after the move was done without actually putting anything away! Either she got lucky or she knows my little OCD ticks far better than I’d like her to. Or perhaps I’m just whipped. So utterly, completely, and redundantly whipped. I’m glad we’re not in Seattle for many reasons—Mark Sloan and Derek Shepherd are two of the main reasons and in this case I am happy all over again to be away from them. I could just see their little amused looks and hear their witty banter now. I would be hard pressed to not retaliate, thus sinking to their level.  
  
In fact I am glad that Callie doesn’t work at my hospital now. I am more open and, dare I say it, human with this staff, but that doesn’t mean I want them to think I’m any less of a hard-ass when it comes to the OR and my heart patients. I like to keep them guessing and just on the edge of ‘don’t mess with her.’ With Callie around that would certainly all go out the window. She would be affectionate, playful, and delight in torturing Dr. Hahn. She told me that was one of her favorite things at SGH—being my friend when no one else really was and flaunting it in front of Christina and Mark since they wanted me each in their own way. I don’t know if Callie meant to do it, but she unpacked all those boxes and I felt like I had to come along after her and put things up on their shelves. Thank god that she told Addison to shelf paper the kitchen, bathrooms, and hall closet. That would have been a pain in the ass to have to do. And I don’t think I could really go to sleep if all that stuff was just laying about. That would have been a shame to have a rough first night of restless sleep the first night with Callie in our knew kingdom.  
  
Waking up this morning to bright sunlight, a warm body, and the sense of having finally clicked all the puzzle pieces into the right place in my life was worth coming along behind my little darlink. I stretched slowly enjoying the new sheets that Callie bought, after shrinking the old ones somehow.  
  
With that overwhelming sense of rightness, came the knowledge that this chapter of my life so far, or my life with Callie has come to an end. Or perhaps the end of the first book in a series? I feel the sense of completion behind me—of things ending and being released to fall peacefully into the memory of ‘the way things were.’ Running my hands up and down Callie’s body eliciting delightful moans and shudders from the depths of her sleeping psyche felt like the best beginning ever. Hopefully it’s like Callie has said to me more than once, ‘Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.’ Or something like that. She said one of her teachers used to say it in school.  
  
If today is the first day of the rest of my life, then it is going to be one fun, sweaty, intimate and sexy ride from here on out. Then again how could life with Callie be anything else?  
  
Tomorrow is another day and starting with today I am going to savor every toe-curling, heart warming, lovely moment of it.  
  
—Erica

 

 

 


	101. Extra #28 Children from Callie's POV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This second post of #28, was written because I forgot which was which--Callie/Erica for odds/evens.

_**Fanfic 100—Children**_  
 __ ****  
May 9, 2009  
  
     When we were children we didn’t know about so many things. Life was simpler and it was easier to be happier with less. We didn’t know that some parents’ love runs out or some friends make better enemies. We didn’t know that cake was bad for us or that in the single blip of a machine life could disappear from us.  
  
     Is that why they say ignorance is bliss? Or perhaps innocence is bliss?  
  
     Right up until you learn about what you don’t have, can’t have, or will never have again?  
  
     If I didn’t know Erica could I have fallen for Arizona?  
  
     Or does not knowing just leave you empty. Is ignorance really bliss or is it just dumb? I guess we can’t fault kids for their ignorance, they just haven’t gone along through life long enough to know things yet. Adults that are ignorant though, well that leads to misunderstanding, hate, and a lot of other issues that are not acceptable because adults should have a certain level of knowledge.   
  
     Simplicity I guess should be strived for and not ignorance.  
  
     My life is better for having known Erica even if I’m still in a rough patch after her leaving. Like my teacher said way back when ‘the first time you feel things, the more powerful it is.’ So I’m in the first heartache place and it’s shit, but like all other difficult learning stages that I’ve been in before, I will go on, recover, and rise above. I just don’t know when that will be though.  
  
     Here I am washed up on a strange shore and only Addison is a familiar face. That’s what fresh starts are about, right? Hey, Aliens, I’m making a fresh start okay? Addison is helping me find an apartment. I’m at a new hospital. I’m making changes. If you give Erica back maybe I can try to make amends. I’d sure like the opportunity.  
  
     No? Let it go. Don’t be foolish.  
  
     I wonder if we were children together would Erica and I have been friends? Would we have played soccer or guitar? Would she have told me about how she wanted to be something in life? Would she have told me about the animals in the kingdoms and species? Could she have told me when the next eclipse was?  
  
     Could she have told me when this eclipse of my heart would end?  
  
     Aliens. I’m going to continue to petition for her release until you give me something. I’m persistent if nothing else.  
  
—Callie

 

 

 


End file.
